By Fakir Hassen, IANS,
Johannesburg : One of the major challenges for India and South Africa as the world moves to a multipolar society is for them to play a role in changing the order for a quality transformation of the global regime so that the countries of the South take their rightful place, Indian Minister of State for External Affairs Anand Sharma said here Tuesday.
“To have all the world’s multilateral bodies such as the UN and financial institutions controlled and dominated by 12 percent of the world’s population, is unacceptable,” Sharma said while delivering the keynote address at the official launch of the first Centre for African Studies on the continent at the University of the Witwatersrand.
“Our countries have changed in a short span of time – 60 years in the case of India and 14 in South Africa – to overcome the denial and discrimination of decades, but there is still a lot of work to be done,” he maintained.
Reaffirming India’s commitment to assist African nations in developing human resource capacity, Sharma said the I-Tech scholarships to train people in India had been doubled.
“This is one area which we thought was important because human resource development and education is important to empower people and to ensure that they are full partners in economic development. Even today, about 20,000 students from Africa are studying at institutions in India,” the minister pointed out.
Sharma added that an initiative announced by then president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam in 2004 during a visit to South Africa had delivered results in several areas.
“This was a satellite for Internet connectivity to overcome the digital divide. There are today 31 African institutions that are connected, resulting in a major leap in telemedicine and tele-education by connecting universities and especially hospitals in Africa, which are linked to the super-specialty hospitals in India.”
Describing this as “a shining example of India-Africa partnerships”, Sharma said he had been “disappointed” to learn that South Africa was not yet part of this project.
Sharma said India was very proud of having achieved in the technological field what Rajiv Gandhi had said in 1985: “He talked of information technology in preparing India for the 21st century.
“Of course, there were few takers and there were many sceptics who believed that that could not happen. But in less than two decades, India has leapfrogged to a leadership situation in information technology. Today 65 percent of the world’s share in IT related services is controlled by India.”
Addressing a wide range of global challenges from the current food and energy crisis to health pandemics and global warming, Sharma said India was very proud of its achievement in agriculture self-sufficiency: “We are very proud that India feeds its eleven hundred million people, because we knew that there is no country in the world that could feed India.”
But at the same time, what India, South Africa and others have to do is to look at the needs of the billions who lived in abject poverty. “It is important to have inclusive and sustainable growth to ensure that the benefits permeate to the poorest of the poor.”
Indian High Commissioner to South Africa Rajiv Bhatia, quoting Nelson Mandela’s view that “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world,” said at the launch: “We are happy to employ this “weapon” creatively to deepen India-South Africa relations.
“We are confident that the Centre will become the fulcrum of efforts to deepen knowledge of India in South Africa and of South Africa in India”, Bhatia said as he handed over a second tranche of several hundred books to the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA).
CISA, to be headed by Stephen Gelb, will promote teaching and research on India at the University of the Witwatersrand, as well as academic exchanges with Indian institutions and public intellectual activity on India and its relations with Africa.