The Importance of the Relationship Between the United Kingdom and India

Lord Patel Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, for securing this debate, congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Minto, on his maiden speech and look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, very much.

I will make brief comments about developing a science and innovation relationship with India, an emerging strong economy, which like all developed economies will soon be an even stronger science and innovation country. The UK has an ambition to be a science superpower, and in some areas like life sciences we probably already are. While I support the hopes that we will re-join as members of Horizon Europe, it is right that we develop associations in science, research and innovations globally, if we are to meet our ambition of being a global science superpower.

The Science Minister recently announced during a visit to Japan a £119 million global collaboration fund for science and business. I hope this signals a wish to develop science collaboration not only with countries such as Japan, but even more so with countries such as India, particularly as we share common values and traditions including education in science. Another advantage is language, as English is commonly spoken and taught in India, particularly in the teaching of science. India has strong research institutions. Nationally, it excels in areas such as space science, computer science and nuclear science, to mention but a few.

I recently met the new high commissioner of India to the UK, Mr Vikram Doraiswami, who is very enthusiastic about establishing a UK-India science link. I hope that our Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office will show the same enthusiasm. We have a model that we can follow: I have been privileged to be a member of the UK-Israel Science Council, of which the noble Lord, Lord Winston, who is not in his place, is a joint chair. It was established over a decade ago by our then-ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, and its continuing success, after over a decade, is due to his foresight. It is a highly successful scheme of science collaboration and exchange of scientists, and is worth duplicating. The success is primarily because of the efforts of our embassy in Israel, and I hope that we can duplicate that with our high commission in India.

Government support is essential: importantly, though, that support has meant that nearly all the funding has come from donations from people in the UK and Israel who have affiliations to both countries. I note that several speakers in today’s debate have associations and affiliations with both India and the UK.

As the UK develops stronger trade ties with India, it is an opportune time to have such ties for science and innovation. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office can play an important part. If his time allows, I would be pleased to meet the Minister to acquaint him further about how UK-Israel science collaboration works, and how it could be replicated with India and the UK, and I would hope to have a subsequent informal meeting with the India high commissioner. I have no doubt that the UK science community will be very supportive of developing a UK-India science council that could provide the exchange of scientists with common interests.