India spoke about the priorities of its G20 presidency on the eve of the summit

India’s G20 Presidency in 2023 will promote “human-centered globalization” and help address global socio-economic challenges at the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Delhi on September 9-10. This was announced to journalists in Delhi on August 14 by the chief coordinator for the preparation of the G20 summit, Harsh Vardhan Shringla, a Vedomosti correspondent reports.

The Ukrainian conflict is one of the factors of global energy, food and inflation risks. But “geopolitical issues are not at the center of priorities” of India’s G20 agenda, which is initially an economic format, Shringla stressed.

A similar position was taken by India’s Sherpa in the G20 (a confidant of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the group) Amitabh Kant. Neither the coordinator nor the Sherpa said whether India would invite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the Delhi summit.

Kant stressed that the leaders of Bangladesh, Mauritius, Nigeria, the Netherlands, Spain, Oman and Singapore were invited to the summit as “special guests”, “demonstrating different economies” in terms of development and geographical location, which corresponds to the Indian summit slogan “One land – one family”. – one future.

“[Перед миром и «двадцаткой» стоят] economic challenges. Unemployment, sustainable development, a third of the world [страдает] from inflation, poverty, a third [стран] the world economy is slowing down, more than 75 countries are in a global debt crisis, [есть] problems of food and fertilizer supplies. This is an important problem – Ukraine, but there are many [других] important issues. It is very important to come to the goals of sustainable development, economic development, technological transformation,” said Kant, Sherpa of India.

Answering the question whether the Ukrainian problem would be separately mentioned in the declaration following the event, as was the case at the November 2022 summit in Indonesia, and whether these points would be agreed upon, Shringla argued that at all ministerial meetings in preparation for the summit (with February to August they were 14. – “Vedomosti”) on key core issues from the fight against corruption to inflation, in fact, consensus was invariably reached. According to him, it was not possible to agree on the “mentioned points” in Ukraine because of the positions of “only two countries” and this did not have a fundamental impact on the result.

“Geopolitical issues will not be discussed through declarations. The G20 is a forum for driving development. We’re going to focus on global economic growth. We expect the declaration to reflect optimism, hope, it will be very inclusive and ambitious,” Kant said, without specifying whether this means the presence or absence of a mention of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in the final document.

India plans to receive 60 delegations of up to 30,000 people, according to Muktesh Pardeshi, operational secretary of the organizing committee of the summit in Delhi, who is responsible for logistics and accommodation of the participants. Unlike past summits, Pardeshi noted, the events will not be concentrated around the capital, but distributed in 60 locations in 28 states and territories of the country, the furthest of which is in the Andaman Islands closer to Southeast Asia, a week to Delhi. This is in line with the idea that India is “the largest democracy in the world”.

But activities involving world leaders and senior officials will be concentrated mainly in Delhi, Pardeshi said.