Riyadh-Delhi ties open up top-class opportunities

The historic Saudi-India relationship is now breaking frontiers by opening up new vistas of opportunities for the citizens from the two friendly countries, which is evident from the fact that the Kingdom now hosts 2.75 million plus strong Indian community — the largest expatriate community in Saudi Arabia and also preferred by the Saudi employers due to their expertise, sense of discipline, and law abiding and peace loving nature. The bilateral ties, which got reinforced and strengthened over a period of time, now enjoy multifaceted relationship reflecting the centuries old economic and socio-cultural ties opened by traders and sailors from India, who used to come to Saudi Arabia for bilateral exchanges. Ipso facto, India and Saudi Arabia see each other as an important partner with India acknowledging the fact that the Kingdom hosts not only the largest number of Indian passport holders in the world but also that these skilled manpower pay rich dividend to the motherland by handsomely contributing in the form of remittances, which is the highest to India from anywhere in the world, thus making an important contribution toward the substantial Indian foreign exchange reserve. Therefore, the bilateral relationship is growing like never before in the history as the progressive approaches by the rich diaspora are more satisfying as well as expanding for both the parties when compared it in terms of previous traditional bilateral records. Moreover, as Saudi Arabia believes that India is a rapidly developing nation, especially in education-based industries, Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC) recently opened a $100 million technology center in Bengaluru, which is a world-renowned center for technology driven industry in India and clearly emerged as the technology hub for research in chemistry, material science and process engineering. Hence, it is now the fast changing dynamics of their relationship, which has gone much beyond traditional energy security and exchange in trade and commerce to the rich diaspora factor, which matters a lot in the making of new opportunities for citizens from the two nations. Committed to further increasing bilateral cooperation in manpower, trade and commerce, IT, communication and higher education, the 11th India-Saudi Arabia Joint Commission meeting in New Delhi in May this year focused on enhancing bilateral cooperation, knowledge exchange and economic ties between the two countries. “A wide range of issues, including cooperation in trade and commerce, higher education, health, communication, culture and IT were discussed,” said the Indian finance ministry after the meeting co-chaired by Commerce and Industry Minister Tawfiq Al-Rabiah and Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. The cultural aspect of the growing bilateral ties is equally important and India sent a high-level delegation with 18 members on a special flight under the leadership of Vice President Hamid Ansari to take part in King Abdullah’s funeral, when the world leaders descended on Riyadh. The Haj and Umrah pilgrimage is another important component of bilateral relationship. During Haj 2014, as many as 135,914 Indians arrived in the two holy cities of Makkah and Madinah to perform Haj.