Expo 2020: India's big plans for the Dubai gala that begins in October

The country is among the exposition's most prominent participants with a four-storey permanent building - its only such exhibition anywhere in the world

With Covid-19 in decline and a vaccine distribution rate of 152 doses** per 100 people, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is preparing for a coming-out party from the pandemic unlike anything in the Gulf and South Asia since coronavirus disrupted normal life a year-and-a-half ago.

When Expo 2020 opens in Dubai on October 1, the world exposition normally held every five years will have a larger physical representation than last year’s United Nations General Assembly, the biggest international gathering to be held anywhere since the onset of the pandemic.

The General Assembly has a membership of 193 countries, but many of its governments did not have any high-level representation in person at the Assembly’s last session in September 2020: normally, the main deliberative and representative organ of the UN draws an average of 100 heads of state or governments to New York every year. When Expo 2020 opens this year, it will have physical participation from 192 countries, Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who is also vice president and prime minister of the UAE, said last month.

Notwithstanding disruptions, “50,000 employees have set up 192 pavilions and 30,000 volunteers are ready to welcome the world at Expo 2020 Dubai”, Sheikh Mohammed said on the occasion of the countdown of 100 days for the Expo opening.

India is among the Dubai exposition’s most prominent participants with a four-storey permanent building. It has been conceived with the intention of converting the Indian pavilion into a permanent exhibition on modern India after the expo is over on March 31, 2022. If these plans materialise, this site will be the only permanent exhibition on India anywhere in the world.

As the UAE is India’s third-largest trading partner with an annual turnover of $59 billion, it makes eminent sense to permanently showcase India’s potential in Dubai, which has emerged as a global entrepôt. The idea fits in with the commerce ministry’s ongoing plans to use India’s diverse resources and the UAE’s wealth to promote joint economic activity in third countries, especially in Arab Africa.

Expo 2020, as its name suggests, was to have opened in Dubai on October 1 last year. For many years it was the UAE’s dream to host the first world exposition in the Arab world. Eight years ago, it won the spot for the 2020 exhibition in the face of stiff competition — similar to the campaigns to host Olympics — at the 169-nation Bureau Inter­national des Expositions (BIE) in Paris. The BIE has regulated international exhibitions since 1931 under a global convention which went into force three years prior.

When the pandemic forced the postponement of the exhibition by a year, with a two-thirds-plus vote at the BIE General Assembly, the organisers decided to retain the name Expo 2020 in recognition of the year when the show was originally scheduled to take place. Thrift being one of the UAE’s virtues, they also saved millions of dollars by not having to change anything from the logo and billboards to letterheads and aircraft exterior where the exhibition had already been advertised.

Once change was, however, pronounced and visible. Dubai embraced the idea that Expo 2020 would simultaneously be a South Asian event going well beyond its earlier scope as something taking place in the UAE with a global footprint. Unfailingly, all the project’s literature and promotions now describe Expo 2020 as “the first World Expo to be held in the MEASA (Middle East, Africa and South Asia) region”.

Tactically, this makes eminent sense. When Dubai was making plans since 2013 to host the Expo, the expectation was that the emirate would receive 25 million visitors from all over the world in the span of six months that make up the duration of the exposition. Although Sheikh Mohammed reiterated this expectation last month, Covid-19 has cast an unmistakable shadow over such expectations. Europeans and North Americans are still wary of undertaking intercontinental travel, especially to unfamiliar places.

The organisers, therefore, intend to target their distant neighbourhood of South Asia for getting the maximum number of visitors to Expo 2020. Naturally, India is on top of the list in view of this country’s large middle-class with affordable income and a penchant for travel — especially after two lockdowns.

Because Dubai is familiar to this category of Indians, the organisers expect that with high velocity promotions, Indians will top the number of visitors to Expo 2020. Hence the ongoing contretemps about reopening flights to and from India.

Instinctively, the Indian pavilion is unlikely to attract this category of visitors except as a drop-in point for patriotic reasons or out of curiosity. But there are 191 other attractions like the Indian pavilion. Reviewing India’s participation, Jitendra Singh, the minister of state in the Prime Minister’s Office, said last month that the Indian pavilion will have 11 themes, of which space technology will have the top slot. Space exploration has caught the popular imagination in the Gulf after the UAE recently became the first Arab country to successfully explore Mars.

**Complete vaccination is 200 doses for 100 people. The UAE has achieved 152 doses per 100 people. 

That is counting those who have had only one dose of the vaccine

The author has reported from the Gulf and West Asia for four decades