PM's Greece visit to help reshape India's trading routes

Sandeep Dikshit

New Delhi, August 12

Apart from attending the BRICS summit in South Africa towards the end of this month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will also visit Greece as India aims to explore the utilisation of its Piraeus port instead of the Chabahar port to send its shipments to Europe faster.

The PM’s visit to Greece is a part of India’s increasing engagements with Mediterranean countries in a wide range of areas, including security and defence.

India’s path to the Mediterranean countries opened up after the UAE’s normalisation with Israel and the formation of the I2U2 (India-Israel-the US- the UAE) economic grouping. This means that India could send the goods to either ports at the UAE or the Adani-owned Haifa port in Israel from where they can go to the Piraeus trans-shipment complex.

“India’s Arabian-Mediterranean (Arab-Med) Corridor to Europe is an emerging multi-modal, commercial corridor that could radically reconfigure trade patterns between the Indian Ocean Region, the Middle East and Europe by creating an arc of commercial connectivity. It would span Eurasia’s southern rim from India’s Arabian Sea coast to Greece’s eastern Mediterranean coast. For India, this new connectivity constitutes a strategic paradigm shift of enormous geopolitical consequence that could reshape its role in the Eurasian economic order,” noted a paper written by Micheal Manchum for the National University of Singapore. “The India-to-Europe Arab-Med Corridor forms an alternative trans-regional commercial transportation route to the troubled Chabahar-based transit corridor,” he added.