Obama Bringing 200 Top Business Leaders with Him to India Next Month

October 29, 2010 Posted by India Briefing Reading Time: 2 minutes

Oct. 29 – President Barack Obama will be accompanied by over 200 senior American businessmen and women on his India visit next month, including.

Among the business delegation will be Indra Nooyi (Pepsico’s India-born CEO), David Cote (CEO of Honeywell), Terry McGraw (CEO of McGraw Hill), Louis Chênevert (CEO of United Technologies Corp.) and Ellen Kullman (chief executive of DuPont).

President Obama’s Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said last week that the president hopes to get “some tangible results” from the visit. Calling it as “an important economic relationship,” he made it clear that Obama will talk a lot about “what we have to do to create jobs, to grow our exports, (and) to ensure that it just doesn’t fall on American consumers to drive world demand.”

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke also said that “trade is high on the agenda” during the trip to New Delhi.

To get Washington and Delhi to “catch up to the business and innovation cooperation that is already happening in New York and Mumbai,” as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it, the CEO Forum has recommended several “interesting and ambitious ideas” in four core areas of infrastructure, clean energy, education, and e-health/biotechnology.

India’s Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee told the CEOs in June that “India offers investment opportunities in excess of US$850 billion over the next five years” with an envisaged investment of US$1 trillion in the infrastructure sector.

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