''India’s outreach at UNGA session to be unprecedented''

New York, September 20

India’s engagement and outreach at the 74th session of the UN General Assembly, set to begin here next week, is unprecedented and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the world organisation will result in a concrete, tangible, action-oriented outcome, India’s Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador Syed Akbaruddin has said.

Akbaruddin, briefing reporters at the Permanent Mission of India to the UN Thursday on India’s priorities and engagements at the United Nations during the high-level session said the extent of India’s outreach at the General Assembly this year is unprecedented.

He said a total of over 75 Heads of State and Foreign Ministers would be meeting Modi, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Minister of State for External Affairs V Muraleedharan during the week across various platforms.

These meetings will not be pull-asides or brush-asides but would be events where either the Prime Minister and his counterparts or the External Affairs Minister and his counterparts will engage in the same room, discussing substantive issues for at least 30 minutes.

“And that’s what I call when I say that the breadth is unprecedented. We have never, ever had this sort of an engagement of this intensity during the General Assembly session with such a broad number of countries,” Akbaruddin said.

He underscored that there is willingness of a large group of countries to engage with India together. PTI