PM Modi's US Visit Will "Catalyze": Ex-White House Covid Response Coordinator

Former Covid-19 response coordinator of the White House, Ashish Jha, on Friday, said that the state visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi will catalyze and the strong partnership between the US and India will become even stronger and better in the next 15 years.

While talking with ANI, Mr Jha said, "We're at an inflexion point and I think, the state visit of Prime Minister Modi will catalyze. And what, I hope, it will do is launch a whole series of collaborations. Obviously, for me, the interest is in health and biotechnology, but it's going to go well beyond that in technology in general and in the future economy of these two countries (India and US). So my expectation is 15 years from now, we're going to look back and think, that was a catalytic moment that took a strong partnership and made it even stronger and better."

PM Modi is all set to start his first state visit to the US next week. From June 20-24, PM Modi will address the Congress of Representatives and will also meet influential people.

"This is a very exciting time for India-US Relations, the two largest democracies in the world, facing similar challenges and facing them together. And I think what makes it particularly important at this moment is we're just coming out of the pandemic and we saw an incredible amount of innovation from both of these countries, both individually and working together. So I think this is an important moment to catalyze that, to take the partnership and take it to the next level. I'm very excited about the moment we are in," Mr Jha added.

Talking about India and the US partnership, particularly during the COVID time, Mr Jha said that the partnership has been incredibly beneficial for both countries.

"We saw partnerships around the development of testing, on the development of vaccines, on the widespread availability of vaccines, and then, of course, all the knowledge sharing that happened. What's interesting to me is that in this pandemic, we saw true partnerships between countries, scientists, governments, and private sector companies. We have never seen anything like this before. And the benefit of that partnership is both countries did much better than they would have if they had not had that partnership," he added.

In a conversation with ANI, the White House former Covid-19 response coordinator pointed out that people have this perception that innovation happens in the West and then India scales it up or manufactures it. But the truth is, in this pandemic, you saw incredible world-changing, life-changing innovations coming out of indigenous work happening in India.

Talking about deepening the India-US relationship, he suggested that one needs strong surveillance systems.

"I think working together, sharing data, sharing information back and forth will not only help the two countries, it will make the world a safer place. I think that's one area around surveillance. One of the key things we need to do is start working on vaccines against future pathogens, including diseases, we don't even know whether they're going to become pandemics or not. That's another area where I think there are a lot of opportunities for collaboration between India and the US. Again on diagnostics treatments and then on better information sharing. This is an area where we saw information was a real challenge in the early days of the pandemic," Mr Jha said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)