Vice President to represent India at the 50th AU Summit

Vice President Hamid Ansari will represent India at the golden jubilee African Union Summit in Addis Ababa later this week, joining around ten select partners of the grouping invited for the occasion.
Ansari will address the gathering of top African leaders in the Ethiopian capital on May 25 focusing on the road ahead especially in the fields of peace-keeping and security, besides cooperation in agriculture, information technology, HRD, education, trade and investment.
India has been among the countries in the forefront of the transformation of African states and considers the 50th anniversary of the Union as a milestone in that endeavour, Spokesperson in the Ministry of External Affairs Syed Akbaruddin said while briefing reporters here on the two-day visit of the Vice President.

Besides India, the other select partners invited for the Summit include the US, the European Union, France, Brazil, Russia, China, Japan, Brazil, Jamaica besides the United Nations.
The high-level delegation led by Ansari to represent India at the AU golden jubilee gathering shows India's "absolute" commitment towards security and infrastructure development of the continent, which had suffered for long because of colonialism and apartheid, the spokesman said.
India, he said, was also giving priority to trade and market access of least developed countries in Africa with which it has time-tested bonds.

To a question on the competition being faced by India from China which was having a higher trade turnover in Africa, MEA officials said while India was having a trade volume of 70 billion US dollars, the Indian investment still exceeded that of the Chinese.

On bilateral interaction with leaders on the sidelines of the Summit, they said those were being worked out.
Ansari is scheduled to return home on May 26.