The
Parliamentary delegation led by Speaker D.Demberel completed its official visit
to India yesterday and proceeded to its next dstination, Vietnam. In Delhi it
called on the
Minister of Foreign Affairs, S.M. Krishna who expressed the hope that the
Speaker’s visit would further strengthen
bilateral relations. Demberel said that he was happy to visit India in the 55th
year of establishment of diplomatic relations, when India under Jawaharlal Nehru
was the first non-communist country to recognize Mongolia.
After talks ranging over politics, economics, nuclear energy and mineral
resources. Krishna and Mongolia’s Ambassador to India V.Enkhbold signed a memorandum
of cooperation between India’s Planning Commission and Mongolia’s National
Development and Innovation Committee.
Later the same day, the Indian Vice President
and ex-officio Chairman of the Upper Houise of Parliament, M.Ansari, received the Mongolian delegates.
They discussed how India could help train Mongolian professionals and how
Mongolians could learn from Indian use of modern techniques and technology.
Demberel invited Ansari and other Parliamentary officials to the Asia Pacific Countries’ Parliamentary
Forum meeting in January in Mongolia.
The delegation also met with the leader of the opposition in the
Indian Parliament, Mrs Sushma Swaraj,
and with members of the Standing Committee on Foreign Policy. Then it called on
Minister of Steel and Industry Virbhadra Singh and Chairman of the Atomic
Energy Commission, Shrikumar Banerjee. Singh suggested coperation in mineral
resources, as importing them through China would save India time and money. Demberel
called for Indian investment in iron ore processing factories in Mongolia. When
Banerjee noted how India needed uranium for its planned nuclear power plants,
Demberel suggested the possibility of joint work in the uranium sector and of
Indian training for Mongolian workers.
India’s exclusively parliamentary TV channel interviewed Demberel before they
left Delhi to see the Taj Mahal in Agra. Their final stop was Kolkata, earlier
known as Calcutta, capital of the eastern state of West Bengal, where they met
with the Speaker of the State Assembly, and made a trip to one of the largest
steel plants in India, apart from visiting the museum at the ancestral house of
Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize.
