Indian Consulate General’s Visit to Halifax

Indian Consulate General, Mr. Satish Mehta was in Halifax recently. Apart from his official meetings, he also took some time to meet with local community members and leaders at a dinner last night, April 11th. 

It was my first introduction to an Indian diplomat in Canada and I was impressed to see the way he handled the questions from the gathered crowd. There is definitely a marked change in the approach of our diplomats and it is heartening to see that we are actually seeking out to improve relations with other countries, especially Canada.

Most of the questions were around the concept of Overseas citizenship, PIO and visa processing. But I thought the most interesting answer was for the question ‘What incentives does the Indian government offer NRIs to do imports of various goods to Canada or other countries?’.

 In his answer, Mr. Mehta stressed the fact that giving incentives is not a sustainable method to increase exports in the long run. Also subsidizing exports means that somebody (our fellow Indian citizens) has to pay for it and the Indian government did not want that. The focus from the government’s side is to make India more easy to do business with. Incidentally, I believe that is the same business tag line for the Port of Halifax No wonder the Port is targetting India as its next big client.

India certainly is the flavour of the season, especially in Halifax and we hope that it continues to be the flavour for a long time to come. As part of increasing awareness about India, its culture, its economy and trade, the South India Cultural Association of maritimes (www.sicam.ca) is organizing an Indian festival in May, Yaathra. As Mr. Mehta pointed out in his speech, every Indian citizen living abroad is serving as an ambassador to the nation. And now is the time for us to take that role a bit more seriously.

Also a quick update on this blog site and its future. I think one of the best values for this site would be to provide information on topics that people are most interested in. Keeping that in mind, here after we plan to publish articles on topics that people are searching on the web related to India and Canada. We also invite contributing authors to contact us if they have something to publish in this space.

Some of the articles that are being worked on are Halifax Port’s role in Improving Trade relations with India, Obstacles on importing from India, What do we export to India.

 Until then…VT.