He said a total of over 75 Heads of State and Foreign Ministers will be meeting with Modi, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Minister of State for External Affairs V Muraleedharan during the week across various platforms. 

These meetings will not be pull-asides or brush-asides but would be events where either the Prime Minister and his counterparts or the External Affairs Minister and his counterparts will engage in the same room, discussing substantive issues for at least 30 minutes.

"And that's what I call when I say that the breadth is unprecedented. We have never, ever had this sort of an engagement of this intensity during the General Assembly session with such a broad number of countries," Akbaruddin said.

"It's very different from normative talking. The UN is known to be sometimes derisively referred to as a talk shop. Talking is important. I don't think that we should deride talk shops because jaw-jaw is better than waw-waw. So talking is important. But more important is that we need to walk the talk and ...What you will see distinctively coming out of the visit this time is concrete, tangible, action-oriented outcomes that we are working on with our partners globally." Modi, who will be addressing the General Debate for the first time in five years, has a packed bilateral and multilateral agenda beginning September 23 till September 27.

In all, he will be delivering nine key speeches at high-level summits and plurilateral engagements. - PTI