Secretary of State John Kerry met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday to promote economic ties with India and set the stage for President Obama’s visit later this month.
“The goal is to have very concrete and tangible things that we can show forward movement on when President Obama and Prime Minister Modi meet, including on climate change,” a senior State Department official told reporters.
Mr. Obama is planning to attend India’s Republic Day celebrations on Jan. 26. It is the first time that an American president has been invited to the event as the nation’s chief guest.
Negotiations between India and the United States on issues like climate change, an agreement on civilian nuclear plants, military purchases, and investment and manufacturing rules have quickened in recent weeks because of Mr. Obama’s coming visit. But it remains to be seen whether the president’s trip will be mainly symbolic or if it will lead to significant agreements.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Kerry participated in an investment conference in Mr. Modi’s home state, Gujarat, which was attended by foreign officials, business leaders and international dignitaries like Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, and Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank.
India’s leaders are eager for more foreign investment to energize the nation’s moribund economy, and the conference was devised to showcase a state where foreign investment has been welcomed in the past 10 years.
When Mr. Modi led Gujarat as chief minister, he was able to smooth the way for foreign investors by speeding the bureaucratic decision-making process. Now that he is prime minister, he must rely more on legislative fixes. And despite having a large majority in the lower house of Parliament, Mr. Modi has yet to deliver many of the promised reforms that investors are seeking.
“We’re trying to complete the circle of economic reforms speedily,” Mr. Modi told the conference attendees. “We are planning to take a quantum leap.”
Attracted by India’s population of more than 1.2 billion people and Mr. Modi’s talk of economic reform, representatives of foreign governments took turns proclaiming their determination to expand economic relations with India.
“Japan and India complete each other,” said Yosuke Takagi, Japan’s economic minister.
During his presentation to the investment conference, Mr. Kerry underscored that the United States wanted to increase trade with India to $500 billion a year, a significant leap from $97 billion in 2013.
“We can do more together, and we must do more together, and we have to do it faster,” Mr. Kerry said.
American companies, however, have faced considerable challenges to expanding their business here, including caps on foreign investment, disputes over intellectual property and provisions that have hampered nuclear energy projects.
The two sides have also been talking for five years about how to navigate around an Indian nuclear liability law that American energy companies insist must be changed before they can build civilian plants in India. The Indians have long complained that American officials should be able to persuade the companies to invest anyway; the Americans say they do not have that power.
"I think there’s a commitment on both sides to try to find a way through that,” said a State Department official, who could not be identified under the agency’s protocol for briefing reporters. “I don’t know whether that will be resolved in time for the president’s visit.”
On efforts to deal with climate change, a policy priority of the Obama administration, Indian officials have repeatedly rejected any notion that India — the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases — should promise any limits on its emissions or growth. Indeed, the government is in the midst of a coal rush, and intends to double the nation’s production of coal in the next five years.
But the two sides may come to some agreement on American funding forsolar power projects. A sticking point for such an agreement, however, is that Indian rules require that components of India’s solar projects be made in India and not purchased abroad.
“That’s what we’re trying to work with India on,” the State Department official said. “We have, obviously, some things that we’ve developed in the high technology area of solar panels that we’d like to be able to bring to bear.”
During his visit here, Mr. Kerry also talked with Indian business executives and met with Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay of Bhutan, the first time in recent memory that an American secretary of state has met with a leader of the Himalayan nation.
Mr. Kerry also toured an ashram that was established in 1917 by Mahatma Gandhi, who led the drive for Indian independence.
“Gandhi’s example inspires all of us to this day and for my generation helped to shape America,” Mr. Kerry wrote in a guest book at the ashram.
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