To decentralise Delhi, PM Modi suggests ‘out of town meetings’

In line with his efforts to project the NDA government as truly national and not focused just on New Delhi, PM Narendra Modi is planning to hold big-ticket bilateral, multi-lateral and Centre-state meetings outside the capital.

Updated on: Aug 16, 2014, 01:01:06 IST

Hindustan Times | By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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In line with his efforts to project the NDA government as truly national and not focused just on New Delhi, PM Narendra Modi is planning to hold big-ticket bilateral, multi-lateral and Centre-state meetings outside the capital.

Modi’s first summit dialogue with Russian President Vladimir Putin in December will be held outside Delhi, though the venue is still not final. During their meeting on the BRICS summit sidelines, Modi had asked Putin to stay longer in India as he wanted to host the Russian leader outside Delhi too. Putin was invited to also visit the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu, South Block officials said.

It is understood that the Prime Minister’s Office has asked the external affairs ministry to host the third India-Africa Forum Summit (December 1-4, 2014) outside Delhi. The first summit was held in New Delhi in 2008 and the second in Addis Ababa in 2011. Though the PMO had indicated Udaipur and Goa as choices, the “options for good hotels” in Delhi’s suburbs made the MEA opt for Gurgaon.

However, the annual Pravasi Bharatiya Diwas, to be organised by the overseas Indian affairs ministry in January 2015, has been shifted to Ahmedabad. “The PM has clearly indicated that multi-lateral events should not be confined to Delhi, but be held in major cities across the country,” a senior official said.

South Block sources said the idea is not limited to MEA as the PM wants even the home and finance ministries to host Centre-state dialogues outside New Delhi. Apparently, Modi has suggested to shift the annual chief secretaries’ and DGPs’ conferences to new venues, with the commitment that he would be there to inaugurate these.

The PM also wants to hold the annual police conference in a North-eastern state so that the Seven Sisters feel integrated with the Union.

This also means that the annual army, navy and air force commanders’ conference may be moved out of the Capital.

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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