Even at that time you were almost upbeat about such a huge growth…

Well, we were working hard to make all this happen. You never know where it lands, but we were working very hard. And it has moved in the right direction. 

Along with trade and investment there are areas like education, innovation around science and technology, energy, clean energy, renewable energy that are also on your priority list. Is cooperation in these areas gaining momentum?

Yes, there has been quite a bit of momentum in all of those areas. So if you look at education, first of all, the number of Indian students studying in Canada has gone up dramatically. It used to be 50,000 a couple of years ago, it is over 100,000 now. We are also trying to bring Canadian students to study in India. That’s very small, but we are trying to increase the size. We are also interested in faculty exchanges, train-the-trainer kind of programmes, to build capacity in Indian institutions. We are also looking at research collaboration between Canadian universities and Indian partners. There’s also some big focus on technical and vocational skills. In the past we focused a lot on pure academics. We are now looking at not only that, but how we can feed into Skill India, for instance.

Through our series on community college we’d be focused on vocational skills. Not only to feed into Skill India but also Make in India. We work closely with companies, colleges, training partners, skill development councils, including the NSDC as well, here in India. And there’s been a lot happening in the last year. On innovations, science and technology in particular, we do have a MoU that was renewed between Canada and the department of biotechnology, another programme that was renewed on funding for small and medium enterprises that brings technology to business. So there’s been a fair bit on science and technology, and business. We also have a joint working group on science and technology that met in the last year at the deputy minister, secretary level. So there’s lot happening on ICT, we have an accelerator programme, incubator programme, all in the last year that have been gaining a lot of ground.