The Skolkovo Foundation over the weekend wound up a trip to India that strengthened business and education ties with Russia.
Speaking on the sidelines of a board meeting, foundation president Viktor Vekselberg noted that “business between Russia and India in the sphere of innovations has a wide field of activity and space for joint projects.”
“The priority for today is the high-tech sphere, where our countries are currently leading the world,” Vekselberg said, before inviting Indian companies to take part in the Skolkovo project.
Skolkovo Foundation president Viktor Vekselberg, center, at a news conference in Gurgaon. Photo: sk.ru
One of the most fruitful part of the three-day trip was a round table in New Delhi that included two members of the Russian government who are the Skolkovo board: Deputy Economic Development Minister Oleg Fomichev and the Deputy Education and Science Minister Alexander Povalko.
Povalko revealed that Russia and India are close to recognizing diplomas from each other’s higher educational institutions, and hope to have the process done by December once creases such as the differing durations in the middle schools of the two countries are ironed out.
Povalko said he wants to see more Indian students at Russian universities, and that by the end of 2019 the overall share of foreign students in Russia should rise tenfold from the current 2 percent.
By the end of the round table, five high-potential spheres of cooperation between the two countries were agreed upon: biomedicine, nuclear energy, IT, energy efficiency, and space.
Those coincide with Skolkovo’s five strategic research clusters.
The Skolkovo Foundation has already overseen concrete steps in the field of space cooperation.
In July, Aniara, an Indian telecommunications company, ordered two geostationary satellites from the Russian division of the international private aerospace company Dauria Aerospace, a partner of the Skolkovo Foundation, on the sidelines of the Farnborough International Airshow in Britain.
Alongside the Skolkovo Foundation board meeting in the city of Gurgaon last week, the two companies signed an extension to the deal that sees ten Russian-produced satellites enter markets in Asia and the Middle East over the next five years.
Fomichev, for his part, vowed to give the space projects priority status and ensure their potential is maximized.
“We have a working group for priority innovations,” he said. “We need to fill the agenda of economic cooperation between Russia and India with such innovative projects.”
The two countries could even join forces to innovate by having private companies set up joint ventures, Fomichev added.
“We see mutual interest in the energy sphere, more specifically in energy efficiency,” he said.