Boris Johnson said he was ready to be more accommodating on an issue that could disrupt talks.
Ahmedabad:
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he is ready to extend more visas to India this year in exchange for a free trade deal that could boost annual bilateral trade by billions of pounds.
Speaking on the plane en route to the world’s second most populous country, Johnson said he was prepared to be more accommodating on an issue that could disrupt talks.
“I’ve always been on the side of talented people coming to this country,” Johnson told reporters. “We are smaller than the hundreds of thousands of people in our economy and we need to take a progressive approach and we will.”
Britain made a trade deal with India one of its priorities after Brexit, as ministers freed from the EU’s common trade policy tried to push policy toward the fastest growing economies in the India region. – Pacific.
India wants more opportunities for Indians to live and work in the UK. Any business deal will hinge on easing regulations and lowering taxes for Indian students and professionals entering India. India and Britain, the former colonial power, already have strong trade ties, and more than a million people of Indian origin live in Britain after decades of emigration.
Britain wants to tap into the wealth of India’s middle class and their appetite for premium British products like Scotch whisky. He also hopes that India will become a customer of its green technology and trade in services will also get a boost. Britain said the trade deal could nearly double British exports to India and increase total trade to 28 billion pounds ($38 billion) annually by 2035. According to British figures, the total trade in 2019 was 23 billion pounds.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by the NDTV crew and is posted by a syndicated feed.)
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