With trade expected to touch $20 billion this year between India and Singapore, the relationship between Singapore, India’s “sherpa” into Asean, and New Delhi was being described as “vibrant” by senior officials, more so as Singapore races to the top of the table as India’s second largest trading partner marked by some of the highest inflows of capital into an investment-hungry India.
The improved figures show higher trade turnovers which include re-exports out of Singapore, a major trading hub, to third countries in the region. Singapore is also India’s second largest FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) investor with substantial investments in India’s real estate sector, IT parks and a thermal power project.
Much of the trade and investment followed the signing of India’s first FTA with this island nation in 2005, the first with any country in the region.
The “strong and enduring” India-Singapore political connect has been nurtured through the nineties when Singapore was the starting point for India’s Look East policy, under the stewardship of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh when he was finance minister in Narasimha Rao’s government.
The people-to-people connect has served to strengthen trade ties leading to a change in the Singapore government’s laws on immigration. A new law makes it easier for more and more educated Indians to be introduced into the carefully calibrated mix of nationalities who form Singapore’s mixed race population.
More educated Indians work in Singapore today than the Chinese who mostly come in as labourers or are employed in the service sector.
The fresh wave of educated Indian immigrants as well as the 9 per cent Singaporeans of Indian origin, mainly Tamil-speaking who settled here in the turn of the 19th century, is a sizeable community which contributes to the need to engage with India. Singapore has “intersected” with India at key moments in its history. Singapore was where Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army was born.
India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru visited the island three times — in 1936, 1945 and 1950 — with return visits by Singapore’s legendary Lee Kwan-yew and Goh Chok Tong.