Major multilateral initiatives to be announced during the G20 Summit

With Prime Minister Narendra Modi personally monitoring G20 preparations, the concerned ministries are giving last minute touches for a successful summit.

Updated on: Sep 8, 2023, 09:17:37 IST

By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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Three major multilateral initiatives—Middle-East infrastructure Corridor, Global Biofuels alliance and scaled up Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII)—will be launched during the G-20 summit tomorrow with possibility of India led global digital public infrastructure “One Future alliance” also making the cut.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will host US President Joe Biden at LKM at 7: 45 pm onwards today. for a bilateral meeting.

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With Prime Minister Narendra Modi personally monitoring the preparation of the G-20 summit, the Ministry of External Affairs, G-20 secretariat, Home Ministry, Culture Ministry and others are giving last-minute touches to the preparations for the multilateral summit. Details like silent five-minute video clips on “India-Mother of Democracy” and “India-Moving Forward'', which will be played in a loop at the Leaders’ Lounge of Bharat Mandapam, have been finalized between ITPO, Culture Ministry and the G-20 secretariat.

While the key event today will be PM Modi’s bilateral meeting cum dinner with US President Joe Biden, India along with close allies Saudi Arabia, UAE and the US will launch the Middle-East Infrastructure corridor tomorrow in the presence of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed. The idea of connecting India with the Middle-East through railroad-ports project was discussed between National Security Advisors of the US, India and UAE and under the leadership of Saudi Crown Prince MBS in May in Jeddah. It is understood that at the heart of this initiative is a major connectivity project linking the West Asian railroad network with Indian ports for a more secure and prosperous Middle-East.

The Global Biofuels alliance will also be launched at the summit with the aim of reducing fossil fuel consumption through climate friendly biofuels like ethanol and jatropha. The alliance has the support of the US and UAE with other countries ready to support the India led effort.

The US-led PGII will be scaled up at the G-20 summit to meet the high-quality infrastructure financing in low and middle-level countries. The aim of the PGII, which was discussed at the G-7 summit in Hiroshima this year, is to mobilize financing for delivering energy, physical, digital, health and climate-resilient infrastructure.

The PGII and the Middle-East Infrastructure Corridor are in many ways alternate to China-led opaque Belt Road Initiative (BRI), which is currently struggling due to the inability of recipient nations in Asia and Africa to pay back high-interest loans from Chinese banks.

Lastly, the G-20 summit is expected to record forward momentum on the “One Future alliance”, a voluntary initiative that aims to bring together all the countries and stakeholders to synergize, shape, architect and design the future of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) that could be used by all the countries. As a leader in digital payments, India promoting the DPI and other close allies are expected to join during the summit.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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