President Pranab Mukherjee reiterated the need to enhance people-to-people ties between India and China, a theme that he has been harping on in his four-day trip to China. He was addressing students and teachers at Beijing's prestigious Peking University on the third day of his trip.
He focussed on eight themes as part of the “people-centric partnership”: regular interactions between government representatives at various levels in both China and India including provincial/state level interactions; youth interactions; colloborative visual media production and development; cultural exchanges through festivals; travel and facilitating tourism especially to holy sites in respective countries; colloboration on sustainable and environment friendly urban development; increasing public awareness about multilateral cooperation between China and India in global and regional fora; and trade and investment. Mr Mukherjee also donated a number of books related to Bengali literature to the Peking University library.
Later in the day, a series of Memorandums of Understanding were signed between Indian and Chinese universities for academic cooperation in the presence of the President at the Peking University campus. Indian institutions included Nalanda University, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, Central University of Gujarat, Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar. They signed MoUs with Peking University, Chang'an University, East China University of Political Science and Law, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Jinan University, Beijing Normal University, Hunan University, Southwest University for Nationalities, Jiangsu University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The MoUs were signed to enhance cooperation in research and training in a host of areas ranging from science, engineering, management studies, urban planning and ecology.
