Longer Visas, A Jobs Exchange And A Ropeway Economy: What India Signed With Switzerland
India and Switzerland signed five agreements in New Delhi on Monday, and the two that will matter most to ordinary Indians concern the right to travel, study and work
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| Image Source: MEA India. |
Alongside it sits a separate agreement on the exchange of young professionals. It allows 300 people from each country every year to take temporary employment in the other in order to build skills in their field and improve their language, a number that can later rise to 500. Verification of a candidate's nationality or residence is to be completed within 30 or 90 days depending on the case.
These are the first substantial easing of movement between the two countries in years and they arrive at a moment when several Western states have been tightening student and work routes rather than widening them.
President Guy Parmelin of the Swiss Confederation arrived in Delhi on a state visit running until 7 October. He was received at the Rashtrapati Bhavan forecourt by President Droupadi Murmu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, laid a wreath at Rajghat, and called on the external affairs minister, S Jaishankar, before talks at Hyderabad House.
The economic backdrop is the trade agreement between India and the European Free Trade Association, the four-country bloc of Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, which is separate from the European Union. That agreement came into force last October and is India's first with any economic bloc in Europe. Modi said it carries a commitment of 100 billion dollars of investment into India over fifteen years and a target of one million direct jobs.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that decisions had been taken to widen market access for Indian goods in Switzerland, naming agriculture, pharmaceuticals, textiles and engineering products, and to make investment easier in the other direction, with Swiss money sought in biotechnology, life sciences, banking, insurance, food processing and sustainability.
Infrastructure is where Swiss involvement is already visible on the ground. Modi cited the ropeway at Varanasi, the Jewar airport at Noida, and railway and tunnelling work in hill areas as examples of what the two countries have built together. A new memorandum between Switzerland's economic affairs department and India's road transport ministry now covers transport technologies and mobility systems, specifically electric vehicles, ropeways, tunnels and the circular economy. Swiss infrastructure firms were invited to invest at scale and to take part in design, manufacturing and training.
A country of nine million people is an unlikely partner for India's hill transport problem but Switzerland has spent a century solving precisely that problem at home and the tunnels and cable systems it has built through the Alps are the reason its companies turn up in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh.
On science, India's Department of Science and Technology signed a letter of intent with the Swiss National Science Foundation to support exploratory research partnerships, and an implementation arrangement with the Zurich University of Applied Sciences to run an academia-industry training programme for early-stage Indian start-ups. Joint research projects in health, clean energy and space are to be launched. An Indo-Swiss Research Flagship event will hold its first session.
The two leaders also identified new possibilities in military exchange and defence production and agreed to deepen cooperation on nuclear energy, though no agreement in either area was signed on Monday.
Modi said the growing popularity of yoga and ayurveda in Switzerland had been discussed as an area for further cooperation.
Parmelin has come with a large business delegation. On 7 October, with him present, India will host a Prosperity Summit with business leaders from the EFTA countries, intended to turn the trade agreement's commitments into specific projects.
For readers wondering why a Swiss president is making a state visit at all with such a long list of deliverables, the office works differently there. Switzerland is governed by a seven-member Federal Council, and the presidency rotates among them for a year at a time. The holder continues to run their own department and is first among equals rather than a head of government in the Indian sense. Parmelin's department is the one responsible for economic affairs, education and research, which is why his name appears on the transport memorandum and why the delegation is weighted towards business.