Indian Minister of External Affairs, Dr Subrahmanyam Jaishankar called on Prime Minister Dr Harini Amarasuriya at the Prime Minister’s Office in Colombo today (October 4).
Dr Jaishankar congratulated the Prime Minister and conveyed the best wishes from the Indian Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi on the election victory of the NPP alliance at the presidential election held on September 21. He assured India’s commitment to work together to further strengthen close bilateral relations. “You can count of our fullest support,” he said.
The Prime Minister thanked India for the assistance given to Sri Lanka over the years and stressed the need for continuous support for speedy economic development. She explained Sri Lanka is going through a transitionary period of economic stabilization.
Emphasizing on the digitalization efforts, Dr Amarasuriya said India’s vast experience in expanding digitalization to rural areas, said Sri Lanka could benefit from them. Both the Prime Minister and the Indian Minister stressed that digitalization will help to cut down waste, corruption and malpractices in transaction and it would hugely benefit the produces, buyers as well as the farming community.
Minister Jaishankar said India would continue to share knowledge on digital platform with Sri Lanka. He said under the Gati Shakthi proramme, Sri Lankan public servants are being trained on ways and means of fast tracking development project implementation. He said India could expand capacity building programmes for several sectors including customs, income tax and postal department.
Minister Jaishankar said the neighbours like Sri Lanka are extremely important to India and there is tremendous goodwill for Sri Lanka in India. He added that the main purpose of his visit is to underline India’s continued commitment to Sri Lanka as its closest maritime neighbour and time tested friend.
The Prime Minister and the Indian Minister discussed mutually beneficial cooperation in different spheres.
The Indian delegation included Indian High Commissioner Santosh Jha, Additional Secretary (Indian Ocean Region) Puneet Agarwal, Joint Secretary Sandeep Kumar Bayapu of Ministry of External Affairs and Deputy High Commissioner Satyanjal Pandey.
Secretary to the Prime Minister Pradeep Saputhathri, Director General (South Asia) of the Foreign Ministry, Niluka Kaduragamuwa, Prime Minister’s Media Director Sugeeswara Senadhira and Senior Assistant Secretary Piyumi Bandara were also present on this occasion.
Prime Minister’s Media