Prime Minister’s India visit to promote trade and investment

David Cameron’s first visit to India as Prime Minister marks the beginning of a proposed “new special relationship” between the countries.

The Prime Minister is taking six Cabinet members and about 60 business chiefs with him as part of a foreign policy initiative aimed at promoting UK exports and investment from Asian countries such as India and China.

Accompanying Mr Cameron will be Foreign Secretary William Hague, Chancellor George Osborne, Business Secretary Vince Cable, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, universities and science minister David Willetts and climate change minister Greg Barker.

The UK already has close links with Indian business. Official figures for 2009 showed total bilateral trade was worth £11.5 billion, with UK exports to India totalling £4.7 billion and £6.8 billion of Indian imports.

India’s growing retail market is worth about £227 billion, and is expected to grow to £352 billion by 2014. It is the UK’s fourth-largest single investor, and approximately 40,000 Indian nationals study at UK universities - a figure Mr Cameron will aim to increase.

Business leaders taking part include BAE chairman Richard Olver; Richard Lambert, director general of the CBI; John Varley of Barclays Bank; Sir Anthony Bamford of JCB and Vittorio Colao of Vodafone.

Sir Gulam Noon, a London-based manufacturer of Indian food products who was born in Mumbai, said: “David Cameron is absolutely right to want a special relationship – we do a lot of business in India, and Britain is getting a lot of inward investment from India.”

© Press Association 2010