FM to begin three-day visit to Norway from Oct 23

NEW DELHI: Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram will leave on a three-day visit to Norway on October 23 to hold bilateral discussions focusing on economic ties.

Chidambaram, who will be accompanied by a business delegation, will hold bilateral discussions with his Norwegian counterpart Kristin Halvorsen.

The two ministers are likely to discuss wide ranging issues of mutual interest particularly related to strengthening of bilateral economic ties in areas such as Information Technology, food processing, hydrocarbons, fisheries, shipping and ship building, hydro-electricity, tunneling and environment.

Chidambaram is also likely to call for policy changes by the Norwegian Government in order to facilitate investments in India from the corpus of the Pension Fund-Global (PFG).

The Norwegian Minister for International Development, Erik Solheim will call on Chidambaram for bilateral discussions on issues related to Bilateral Development Co-operation.

Chidambaram will also meet the Governor of the Norges Bank, the Central Bank of Norway.

Norway's Pension Fund-Global, which has a huge corpus of more than 350 billion dollars is being managed by the Investment Management (NBIM) division of the Norges Bank. NBIM is currently registered with SEBI in India and has started investments in India from July 2005 and as per SEBI, the purchase value of Norges Bank investments in India on October 4, 2007 was Rs 2107 cores ($533 million).

While GPF-G investment in India has crossed half a billion dollar mark in two years time from its registration with SEBI in June, 2005, the figure is only 0.15 percent of the total corpus of GPF-G. Chidambaram's meeting with the Norges Bank Governor is significant in this context.

Chidambaram will also attend an Investment Promotion Symposium, which is being organised by business and trade associations of Norway to help promote bilateral investments.

He will also visit the prestigious Noble Institute at Oslo, where he will deliver a keynote address on "India's Socio-Economic Agenda: Development with Democracy", besides he will visit the Norwegian School of Management BI at Oslo, which is Europe's largest private business school, and will deliver an address on "India's emergence as an economic power: Road traveled and the way forward".

An IT outsourcing event is also being organised keeping in view India's strength in this sector, which is likely to be attended by Norwegian business houses and also representatives from the India IT industry. Chidambaram will also attend this event.