A new trade corridor with ports, maritime transport, road and rail links will now connect Asia to Europe, the Arabian Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean, with India, the United Arab Emirates and Israel as major transport hubs. This will be the third integrated corridor of its kind with a strong Indian role to compete with China’s new Silk Road. At the same time, it will fill gaps in the Persian-influenced North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) by offering India an alternative trade route so that its trade transportation is not dependent on Iran and Russia. As nationalnews.com points out, this new trade corridor will not only transform trade between the Indian Ocean region, the Middle East and Europe, but along the way will change geopolitics at the southern tip of Eurasia.

Some aspects of the new trade corridor were agreed upon at a recent summit attended by the leaders of India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and US President Joe Biden, but it is not an American-inspired or influenced project. According to a recent study by the Middle East Institute, the Indo-Arab-Mediterranean Corridor is the result of cooperation and joint research between the UAE, India and Israel through “bilateral partnerships and joint public-private investments.”

The Indo-Arab-Mediterranean transport route will change the geopolitics of the southern tip of Eurasia.

The new trade corridor will allow goods arriving from the Emirates on the west coast of India to be transported by rail via a line through Saudi Arabia and Jordan to the port of Haifa on Israel’s Mediterranean coast. And from there follows the sea route connecting Haifa with continental Europe to the port of Piraeus or to the major ports of Italy, from Taranto to Trieste. Transporting products through Greece, the new trade corridor will reach major European markets and processing centers, transporting Indian goods from Mumbai to the port of Piraeus in 10 days. The most recent development of the new corridor was the July 14 purchase of the port of Haifa in Israel by a consortium led by Indian companies Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone. The favorite to buy the port of Haifa was initially a consortium led by DP World from the United Arab Emirates. However, the success of the Indian joint venture is seen as the best possible development as it stabilizes the new trade corridor.

The new corridor is no doubt a response to China’s equally ambitious project, which has been underway for about eight years now: the new Silk Road, as a network of ports built by Chinese companies and stretching from the southeast has become known as Asia West. Some in New Delhi are suspicious of the Chinese plan, seeing it as leading to a sort of naval siege of India as it stretches from the ports of Burma and Bangladesh on the east side of India to Sri Lanka on the south side of India and Pakistan on the east. . western part of India.

New Delhi Alliance with Tel Aviv and Arab Investments

New Delhi’s response to this strategic challenge, the feeling that China is surrounded by the sea, has been a complex Iranian-influenced INSTC corridor and an equally complex trade corridor connecting India to Europe via Iran, Central Asia and Russia. The central place in it is occupied by the construction of a deep-water port off the coast of Iran in Chabahar, as well as automobile and railway arteries north of Chabahar through Iranian territory and Afghanistan to Central Asia. However, the geopolitical risks and economic crises that have gripped the region over the past 20 years have prevented the completion of this corridor. Therefore, New Delhi has been forced to look for a way out, as it considers its dependence on a single trade route connecting Asia with Europe to be de facto problematic when Iran and Russia, two countries in which Western countries have imposed sanctions, are at the center of this corridor. And this third corridor, India, the Arab Emirates and the Mediterranean, offers a way out, in which India is still one of the two largest partners.

The third gateway of the corridor to Europe is Israel, which is India’s partner in innovation, agriculture and water technology. At the same time, the role of the United Arab Emirates is also important, since it was Abu Dhabi that determined the course of the corridor in 2017, when it signed 14 agreements with New Delhi, including many of them related to maritime transport and transport logistics. cargo and warehouses. Emirates’ contribution to the new trade corridor is mainly focused on the development of logistics and distribution infrastructure. Several well-known Emirati companies, including DP World, a logistics and port management company, construction giant Emaar Group, as well as retail conglomerate Sharaf Group, have taken on major projects in the $7 billion project.
As for Israel, for more than a decade it has contributed to the development of India’s food production system through its innovations in agricultural production technologies and water management, and has also helped increase India’s food production to record levels. An indicator of the cooperation between the two countries is the 50-50 joint venture established by the Israeli irrigation and irrigation system company Metzer with the Indian pipe company Skipper to jointly produce components for irrigation systems.

Impressive Growth, Tycoons and Growing Inequality in India

“The way the world sees India is changing, India has hope and the reason is the skills of 1.3 billion Indians.” With these words on Monday, August 15, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to turn India into a developed country over the next 25 years. It was his festive speech on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of August 15, 1947 and the independence of the country, which put an end to almost two centuries of British colonial rule. It is hard to argue with this when the Indian diaspora has spread all over the world and young Indians are studying at major international universities and occupying influential positions in the business world. Among them are Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft Satya Nadella and head of Twitter.
Parag Agarkaval.

In the 75 years since the end of colonial rule, India has become a dynamic economy, and all indications are that it has gained momentum to leave China behind at some point in the next few years. The World Bank recently upgraded India from a low-income country to a middle-income country. The classification indicates that the country has a GDP per capita from 1,036 to 12,535 dollars. According to UN estimates, India’s population will soon exceed that of China, which is beginning to show the pathologies of a developed economy and, in particular, low birth rates. India’s GDP exceeds $2.8 trillion. dollars, and economic analysts agree that over the next 25 years it will become the third largest economy in the world. India’s upward trajectory over 75 years of independence can be considered impressive.

In 1947, its historic first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, told Indians that “there is a rare moment in history when we take a step and move from the old to the new, when an era ends and a nation finds a voice after long oppression.” However, in reality, chaos reigned in the country. The average life expectancy for men was only 37 years, and for women – 36 years, and only 12% of the population could read and write. Today, the average life expectancy is 70 years, and the proportion of Indians who can read and write has reached 74% for men and 65% for women. India owes much of its spectacular transformation to reforms introduced in the 1990s by then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, which opened the country to foreign investment capital after a severe debt crisis.

However, at the same time, the number of billionaires in India is constantly growing. Today there are at least 100 of them, while at the beginning of the millennium there were only nine. They include tycoons Gauta Adani, worth $130 billion, according to Forbes, and Mukesh Ambani, founder of Reliance Industries, worth $95 billion. Oxfam inequality.

Dispute

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bet, as he has repeatedly stressed, is to “break the cycle of poverty” in India, but according to the World Bank and according to the latest figures, even today 60% of its population, somewhere around 1.3 billion people live on less than $3.10 a day.

Prediction

Among economic analysts overlooking China’s gradual weakening on the international stage, Dabisa Moyo, a former British government adviser and current Chevron board member, recently predicted that “China’s debt and demographic problem will be very problematic over the next 10 years.”

stereotypes

Commenting on India’s former image and the suspicion it aroused in the West, Rohan Venkat, a consultant at the Indian Center for Policy Research, noted that “he was strongly influenced by the West’s prejudice against the East, some of which may have been well founded. but too many of them were nothing more than mere stereotypes.”