Indo-German Economic Ties

1.India and Germany signed multiple pacts and joint declarations of intent and exchanged agreements after bilateral talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in New Delhi on Friday.The agreements were inked for cooperation in fields such as space, civil aviation, maritime technology, artificial intelligence, digital technology, medicine, defence, cyber security and education.

2.Prime minister said the expertise of economic power houses like Germany could help in his government’s aim to build a “new India” by 2022.He invited Germany to also take advantage of opportunities in defence production in dedicated corridors in Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, Germany is India’s largest trading partner in Europe and more than 1,700 German companies operate in the country. It is also the second largest research partner worldwide for India after US.

3,Within Germany there is desire to expand their options in Asia and not to focus exclusively on China.

• India and Germany can  fruitfully collaborate not just on the technical aspects but also on policy aspects because we also can learn from some European examples in these areas.
• Clearly in areas such as E-mobility, fuel cell technology and so on we on medicines, biochemical there are many areas where Germany has been at the fore front, where they haven’t been a fore front is in their area of information technology and this is an area where they benefit from the partnership with India.
• Germany along with China is one of the  two biggest exporting machines in the world.
• Germany and India are increasingly worried about the US-China trade despite and the mishandling of the WTO machinery in this regard. They need to corroborate the policies here.
• (With Russia because of  Ukrainian crisis ).They are still trying in Germany a kind of selective engagements with Russia.  They are very seriously looking towards India for major engagements.
• In last 5 year they have been  are hopeing that India could be able to deliver FTA with EU but that hasn’t happened.They however are  not talking too much about FTA because they know that these things are not going to happen in hurry, so they are starting to focus more on  sustainable development, renewable energy, mobility’s and those are the kind of issues on which  all the 16-17 agreement which have been signed.
• One more area which perhaps we need to focus more on is the MO. This is on the Mobility agreement we haven’t look very carefully still even little bit of slowdown in Germany.  In the  next 10-15 years, they will be generating about 80-90 % job in medium to high skill sector and they are looking for lot of skilled manpower from outside and India can definitely fill this gap.
• Even if we look at blue card scheme which started couple of years back, Germany is the only country which has  actually implemented seriously. It has 85 per cent of all blue card which been issued ,  and out of all the 85 per cent card have been issued more than 20 to 25 per cent cards have been issued on to just only mainly in India and mainly in I.T industry
• Education- where as mentioned earlier there is a skilled shortage in Germany for every engineer that retires and they are not able to get another engineer to fill the place. For Every 11 engineers who retire they are able to get 1 as a substitute. Now there are now 20 thousand students Indian students in Germany and many are post graduates with technical background, Germany itself has a technological partner with IIT Chennai and they have looking to expand this.