Obama, Manmohan Singh to meet at G-20 summit

US President Barack Obama would meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the sidelines of the G-20 Summit in Toronto, a top Indian official said Wednesday. "The Prime Minister would be traveling for the G-20, he will be meeting President Obama," Union Minister of Commerce and Industry Anand Sharma told Indian media-persons in Washington. This would be the first meeting between the two leaders after Nuclear Security Summit in Washington in April. The meeting would also give Obama and Singh an opportunity to review the series of high level talks between the top officials of the two countries including the first ever Cabinet-level Indo-US Strategic Dialogue.

Reconstituted by Obama and Singh in November last year, the Indo-US CEOs Forum had its second meeting on Wednesday. Sharma along with Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee were in Washington to attend this meeting. They also held bilateral talks with their American counterparts. "President Obama will be visiting India late autumn and we are looking forward to his visit," Sharma said. Meanwhile, State Department spokesman P J Crowley told reporters at his daily news briefing that Obama's visit to India later this year is a very important trip. "We are mindful of the fact that obviously we'll have an important trip by the President to the region later this year. So there's a lot of work to do, and the meetings that we have are a reflection of that," he said. "I think what we've been doing this week is a logical extension of the recent strategic dialogue that we have with India. You can see that in other contexts, once you establish that dialogue and the structure that goes along with it, there are important follow-on meetings as we've just indicated that's happening in the dialogue with Pakistan," Crowley said.

"So it does reinforce the breath of our common interest, but forming a strategic dialogue is not just about some fancy title; it really involves very specific issues and it has a formal structure that allows us to work through those issues and follow up on the recent high-level meeting between the Secretary and Foreign Minister Krishna," he said in response to a question.