PM MODI SEEKS INCLUSIVITY.PROSPERITY, SECURITY THROUGH G-20

In the G-20 meetings that took place in Mumbai, significant attention was paid to the environment. Another priority was sending into extinction the global terror industry.

- MADHAV NALAPAT

Last November, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took on the responsibility of assuming the Presidency of the G-20, the group comprising the world's twenty largest economies. Since then, the Indian Presidency has engineered a transformation in the way in which the G-20 has been functioning, making its activity not a sporadic but a continuous process. Across India, meetings involving the 19 countries (plus the European Union taken as a separate entity) have been held, and reviews and action plans worked out and initiated. The latest of these planning sessions has just concluded in India's Maximum City. During the latter part of the week. Mumbai witnessed the Mid-Year Review meeting of members of the G-20 in what is among the largest such complexes in the world, the Jio World Centre in Mumbai's Bandra-Kurla Complex. Its vast inner spaces include the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, which was bequeathed to the city in a context where the last mega cultural centre built in Mumbai was the National Centre for Performing Arts in 1969. The dimensions of each segment of the Jio World Centre are immense, such as the world's biggest passenger lift. "Yeh hai Mumbai, meri jaan", so it is small wonder that the newly opened Jio World Centre was chosen as the venue for the meeting in Mumbai of the country teams dealing with issues confronting the G-20. As in previous sessions, the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) together with the Ministry of External Affairs played the anchor role in organising logistics for facilitating work of the G-20 during India's year at the helm.