India's Prime Minister to arrive in Moscow

Prime Minister of India Atal Bihari Vajpayee will arrive in Russia on Tuesday on a three-day visit. During the visit he will meet with president of Russia Vladimir Putin.

As spokesman for Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs Alexander Yakovenko said in an interview with RIA Novosti, a large package of documents on different fields of cooperation is expected to be signed.

At the talks the sides plan to pay particular attention to trade and economic cooperation. Yakovenko highlighted effective interaction of Moscow and New Delhi in carrying out such large-scale projects as oil production on Sakhalin shelf with the participation of the ONGC Videsh company of India (the Sakhalin-1 project), the construction of the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in the south of India, and prospecting for hydrocarbon raw materials on Bay of Bengal shelf.

We hope for continuation of the work to implement the large-scale promising projects of Russian-Indian partnership in the power industry, metallurgy, civil aviation, space, and expansion of mutually advantageous cooperation in new research-intensive and high-technology economic sectors, the spokesman for Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. Moscow also reckons on using the Indian "rupee" debt for investment purposes in joint projects.

For his part, Vajpayee noted on the eve of the visit that "a sizeable increase of the goods turnover" which now stands at about 1.5 billion dollars could be achieved by making industrial plants more active. In his opinion, intensification of the high technologies and biotechnologies sphere could play a special role in this.