International - India & World   

India-France Foundation on the anvil

Paris: French President Nicolas Sarkozy is to announce the creation of an India-France Foundation during his 36-hour visit to India this week.

The foundation will replace the Indo-French Forum which meets twice a year and which has so far failed to deliver concrete results in terms of cooperation and joint action between the two countries whether it be in the economic, cultural or scientific fields.

Mr. Sarkozy will launch an appeal for sponsors for the Foundation, expected to be inaugurated by the Indian Prime Minister during a slated visit to France next autumn. India has agreed to the proposal, it is learnt.

While the Forum set up 10 years ago has some achievements to its credit like organising the Water Week in 1999 and the exhibition of sculptures from the Gupta period held in Paris last year, it is felt that the Forum has lost much of its dynamism.

Top French business leaders who are part of the Forum rarely bother to attend its meetings and the body has now become a rather expensive talk shop.

The Foundation is expected to work as an umbrella organisation coordinating various cooperation projects and exchanges. It would hold seminars and workshops and act as a business forum, organise scientific exchanges and have leadership programmes for students and young professionals..

The idea of setting up a Foundation along the lines of the India-America Foundation was first mooted by Christophe Jaffrelot, the Director of CERI (the Centre for Studies in International Relations), who is an acknowledged authority on contemporary India and on the question of Hindutva in particular. “An endowment would have been ideal because it would have given the proposed Foundation a certain independence and autonomy. But in order to be able to function effectively on the interest of the seed money alone, we would need a huge sum which would be difficult to find right away. If 20 sponsoring companies (10 from each country) pay out €50,000 each we could become operational very quickly,” he told The Hindu.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Have patience, Musharraf tells West
Suspects linked to Lashkar?
U.K. also failed to foresee Iraqi militancy
Behave, Chavez warns dairy farmers
Singapore reassures IOC
Did Benazir have premonition?
15 Tigers killed
Madhesh talks to begin
Hindraf plans to unveil “Gandhi shirt”
India-France Foundation on the anvil
Satellite will spy on Iran: Israeli media

Copyright © 2008, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu