Prime Minister Viktor Orbán met Vice-President of India Mohammad Hamid Ansari for talks in Budapest on Sunday. Afterwards Orbán said “Hungary needs investors like India”. Hungary was approaching full employment and had “exhausted its labour force”.
Hungary’s technologies call for continuous improvement, which requires investment from foreign countries, including India, Orbán said. He noted that in the past two years India had made the largest greenfield investments in the country, and further projects are planned.
He said India is ready to make joint use of Hungarian innovations and to exploit the results of research and development. Thus a technology working group was being set up to connect up respective capabilities in the area of innovation.
Orbán said the defence industry offered opportunities for good co-operation between the two countries. Agricultural ties were also important. Further, he mentioned co-operation in the film industry, adding that a delegation would visit India to assess opportunities.
The Prime Minister said the starting point for co-operation is the fact that both countries are democracies. Hungary supported Indian efforts in international relations, and its “endeavours to obtain worthy representation in the world’s newly evolving system of institutions”.
Ansari called bilateral ties multi-faceted and friendly. Both countries are democracies with fast-growing economies, he added, underlining the defence industry, science and the film industry as prospective areas of co-operation.
He noted that they had signed a statement of intent on co-operation between the Indian Council of World Studies and the Hungarian Institute of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, as well as the Ministry of Interior and the Indian ministry for water and river management and the restoration of the Ganges.
Ansari said they had agreed that terrorism must be eliminated in the framework of global co-operation.
After the meeting, India’s Ambassador to Hungary, Rahul Chhabra, and the director of the Institute of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Márton Schőberl, signed a co-operation agreement between the Indian Council of World Affairs and the institute.
