RIYADH — India's Minister of Finance P. Chidambaram will visit Saudi Arabia to co-chair the 10th session of the Saudi-India Joint Commission Meeting (JCM), scheduled to kick off in Riyadh on Monday. He will be accompanied by Arvind Mayaram, secretary in the Department of Economic Affairs, and other senior officials representing different ministries. Chidambaram will meet Minister of Commerce and Industry Tawfiq Al-Rabiah, who will co-chair the JCM from the Saudi side. The meeting is expected to discuss various issues of economic and commercial interest to both sides, including an increase in exchange of business delegations, trade facilitation, cooperation between educational institutes and sharing expertise in science and technology. In the previous JCM session, the two sides have identified 42 areas of cooperation and made significant progress in each of those areas. "Bilateral trade and commercial relations between India and Saudi Arabia is growing at a steady rate. Saudi Arabia is the 4th largest trading partner for India. The value of the two-way trade between the two countries in 2012-13 exceeded $43 billion and reached $32.7 billion during April-November 2013, registering an increase of 14 percent over the corresponding period in the previous year. Saudi Arabia is the largest supplier of crude oil to India and provides 19 percent of India's crude imports. The "Riyadh Declaration" signed by Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2010 emphasized the importance of developing a broad-based economic partnership that reflects the ongoing transformation of their economies. — SG
