New Delhi

India Budget 2024: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman hailed India's G20 presidency and described the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) forged during the New Delhi Leaders' Summit as a "strategic and economic game changer".  The connectivity project aims to facilitate the flow of commerce, energy and data to, from and between India, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel and Europe.

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"India assumed G20 presidency during very difficult times for the world," Sitharaman said in Lok Sabha on Thursday (Feb 1) while presenting India's interim Budget for 2024. The interim budget or the vote-on-account was presented ahead of India's general elections in the spring in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi is seeking a third consecutive term in power. 

"The country showed the way forward and built consensus on solutions for those global problems," the Indian finance minister said while referring to the joint statement delivered as G20 New Delhi Leaders' Declaration. 

Also read | The Capitals: Delhi delivers as the voice of Global South

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Referring to the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), Sitharaman repeated Prime Minister Narendra Modi's remarks that the corridor "will become the basis of world trade for hundreds of years to come, and history will remember that this corridor was initiated on Indian soil".

India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor

India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor | WION

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Finance Minister Sitharaman's remarks came a day after India's President Droupadi Murmu, in her ceremonial address to the parliament ahead of the budget session, hailed the IMEC as an ambitious connectivity initiative. "This corridor will further strengthen India’s maritime capability," President Murmu said. 

Also read | India-Middle East-Europe Corridor will strengthen India’s maritime capability, says Indian President Murmu

The IMEC is the latest in the series of connectivity projects that India is looking to strategically and economically leverage, apart from the North-South International Corridor, and the Chennai-Vladivostok project. 

On October 29, 2023, US President Joe Biden described the IMEC as connectivity project aimed at building a "better future for the Middle East", and the one that will make West Asia "more stable, better connected to its neighbours". 

Also read | Israel-Hamas war: Joe Biden's wartime address hails India-Middle East-Europe corridor

Biden on October 29, said that with the "innovative projects such as India-Middle East-Europe economic corridor that we announced earlier this year in the summit of the world's biggest economies", the region will benefit with "predictable markets, more employment, less rage, and less grievances."

"IMEC undoubtedly represents a great vision with far-reaching implications. Now it requires to be turned into a long-term, viable project. Initial work has begun. Inevitably it will need time and sustained, multi-national effort for optimal fructification," Rajiv Bhatia, former Indian ambassador and Distinguished Fellow at Mumbai-based Gateway House, told WION. 

Sitharaman delivered her sixth consecutive Union Budget speech on Thursday (Feb 1) and pitched the growing economic prospects of the world's fifth-largest economy as an imminent sign of India becoming a developed nation in the coming decades.