Mohammed bin Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, the UAE, will be arriving in New Delhi on Tuesday (January 24) on a three-day state visit to India, his second in two years. Besides being India's guest at the Republic Day celebrations this year, many bilateral agreements are slated to be signed.
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"We are expecting to sign around 13 agreements, which will be crowned by the main agreement that will be the strategic dialogue," the Hindustan Times quoted Ahmed Abdulrahman A AlBanna, the UAE ambassador to India, as saying. The agreements will be signed after Al-Nahyan's meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi scheduled for Wednesday.
Apart from being the fifth largest supplier of crude oil to India in 2015-16, the UAE is also one of the top investors in India, while the UAE mainly imports gems and jewellery, vegetables, fruit, spices, engineering goods, tea, meat and its preparations, rice, textiles and chemicals.
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), a sovereign wealth fund established in 1976, has investments in India as part of its global portfolio.
Among its many investments, the ADIA holds 1.77 percent equity stake in IT software services exporter Infosys. The ADIA was ranked the second-largest in the world at about $790 billion by the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute last year.
The UAE embassy in New Delhi ranks India as the third largest investor in the Gulf country.
A significant aspect of the Prince's presence as chief guest would be the participation of a military contingent from the UAE that will march during the Republic Day parade.
Al-Nahyan would also call on President Pranab Mukherjee and Vice President Hamid Ansari during his visit.
Top on the agenda of the Prince's visit would be strengthening bilateral trade between the two countries that stood at about $50 billion in 2015-16, according to a media briefing by India's external affairs ministry on January 19, 2017.
On his February 2016 visit, the ministry had pegged the bilateral trade lower. "The two sides expressed satisfaction at the level of bilateral trade, which amounted to $59 billion in 2014-15," it said in a briefing on February 12, 2016, after the Prince's maiden state visit that year.
Business and trade talks will be important as the Prince's delegation comprises ministers, senior officials and captains of the industry.
There are about 2.6 million Indian expatriates in the UAE. Modi had visited the UAE in August 2015. Air connectivity between the two countries is high; while Emirates operates about 180 flights to India every week, four Indian carriers — Jet Airways, SpiceJet, IndiGo and national carrier Air India — operate about 300 flight weekly, according a report in the Economic Times last February.
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In its 2015-16 annual report, Emirates said that it contributed about $848 million to India through its operations, citing a joint study with the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER).
