The foreign minister of the Netherlands will be coming to India in March 2023for the G20 Foreign Ministers meeting. In fact there will be several other delegations coming from Netherlands too.

India as the next G20 Presidency has invited the Netherlands as a guest country. In the G20 context there will be several delegations coming to India for different meetings and there will also be bilateral meetings related to different sectors.

The Netherlands is looking towards India to deepen technology collaboration beyond the water, agriculture and health agenda.

In an exclusive interaction, Ambassador Marten van den Berg, tells Financial Express Online: “Our country is keen on deepening cooperation with India in various sectors including energy, renewable technologies, for example, in green hydrogen, in solar, in offshore wind.”

Delegations coming in 2023

The foreign minister of the Netherlands will be coming to India in March 2023 for the G20 Foreign Ministers meeting. In fact there will be several delegations coming to India from the European nation to join all G20 related meetings.

“We already started to work together in the Netherlands in G 20 context, long before India took the presidency on December 1, and for example, we organised together with the OECD a workshop several months ago with the whole G 20 team in India to share our experiences. It was a very productive meeting and we talked about what kinds of issues are very relevant,” adds the Ambassador.

He points out, “Topics like agriculture, water energy transition for the G 20 agenda were also discussed as our country has a lot of experience in those areas. And both sides already have a close collaboration on these topics. So, we can support the Indian presidency on these issues, and also in terms of the finance track. The Netherlands, for example, has a long history in international finance, in making financial markets more transparent, but also in climate finance, in finance, for energy transition, analysis, extremely active in international boards and also with our central bank. So we share our experiences with the Indian presidency.”

Which tracks can the Netherlands support during the Indian G20 Presidency?

According to him, the sectors in focus include energy transition, finance, water, agriculture, also climate, “There is also a priority of the Indian presidency on gender. For the first time, India wants to make gender a very relevant topic in all the tracks. The Netherlands very much supports this and is extremely active in gender equal quality.”

Geopolitical Tension

The Netherlands is in favour of multilateral frameworks. He explains that the G20 is a very important forum and “what we have seen in Bali was very positive, that we really had a Bali statement. The Netherlands would be supportive in working on having statements and having an effective G 20 presidency during the coming year.”

R&D

“There is already a strong collaboration between the Netherlands and India in R&D. This is a very important aspect of our relationship – technology and innovation. There are joint programmes, which are jointly funded by both countries,” he says.

“But now we are looking at space technologies, as we have a huge space ecosystem,  and the European Space Agency is based in the Netherlands. There is a huge potential to be tapped in the Space sector and recently there was a delegation level visit from the Netherlands to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO),” highlights the Ambassador

According to him “India is strong in satellite technologies, especially small scale satellites. Also, we are interested in cyber security technologies and we are discussing that with India too.”

StartUps

He signs off saying,“We are very much focusing also to connect startups here with our technology programmes. Some Indian startups are active in the Netherlands in the health technology, robotics sector. We have what we call a soft lending program in the Netherlands for startups and we are looking at the possibilities of connecting them with the government agencies, how we can connect them with funding opportunities, and funding possibilities.”

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