Indian Technical & Economic Cooperation day celebrated

India's relations with Egypt have always been special and the two nations were now trying to expand cooperation in various fields like culture, business, investment, trade and politics, the country's envoy here said.
Marking the Indian Technical & Economic Cooperation (ITEC) Day at a function here yesterday, Ambassador Navdeep Suri said: "The ITEC is a crucial component of the relationship between India and Egypt."
"We started 50 years ago but we have picked up momentum in the last two or three years and we have been able to increase the number of training slots available for Egypt to 100 per year," he said.

ITEC has hosted around 300 Egyptian scholars so far, who have attended various short-term training courses in India in the last few years.
Launched in 1964, ITEC is aimed at fostering cooperation and partnership to address the needs of friendly developing countries including the human resource development.
Under the programme, India shares its technical expertise with Egypt.

The scheme offers training in over 250 courses in prestigious educational, technical and vocational institutes in India in a variety of fields ranging from information technology to management, vocational training, banking, finance, English language and so on.
"The reason behind the success of this programme is the model we have chosen, we don't try to send people to courses that we choose.

We offer a menu of 280 courses in 50 of our finest institutions, which made available to the government of Egypt through the ministry of international cooperation to choose people according to Egyptian requirements and apply for them," Suri said.
Expressing confidence in bilateral ties, Suri said the coming days would see renewed cooperation between the two nations in business and trade, investment and culture.
Encouraged by the considerable interest in Egypt in the programme, the Government of India has decided to offer around 100 ITEC slots to Egyptian officials and nationals annually.
In 2014, Egypt's Ministry of International Cooperation has received about 300 applications from more than 55 Egyptian ministries, government authorities and public universities, said Samia Hassan Kamal, supervisor of the Central Department of ASEAN and Australia, Asian cooperation sector in the Ministry of International Cooperation.

Kamal was representing Naglaa el-Ahwany, the Minister of International Cooperation.
"Egypt is planning to maximise its benefit from the ITEC programme because India has been an excellent model with regard to challenge invests to human capital development and resources management," she said.