Heads of major corporations and members of business communities of five BRICS countries had a meeting of the group's Business Council earlier in the day within the framework of BRICS/SCO summit in Ufa, Russia. The main issues on the agenda were the ways to boost business partnership, as well as launch of the New Development Bank (NDB).
"There are tremendous opportunities for Russia-India investments, especially in what concerns Russian Railways and Rostec. India is a huge market, and we need good infrastructure. Russia has a great railway system, and can play a very important role in collaborating with India," Onkar Kanwar, head of Indian corporation Apollo Tyres, said.
The two countries have long-standing economic and defense ties, Kanwar emphasized, adding that the partnership with Rostec can mainly be in the sphere of defense technologies modernization.
"There is a lot of modernization required in our defense equipment. We need to see how we can set up special places in India for the maintenance of old equipment… Rostec is a very large corporation, and there are lot of ideas where we can use their technologies," he said.
India is a member of the BRICS group of developing economies, which also includes Russia, China, Brazil and South Africa, as well as an observer state of the SCO security bloc, whose permanent members are China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
Russia and India cooperate on a wide range of issues, including in economic and defense sectors. India is the second-largest market for Russia's defense industry, having purchased $4.8 billion worth of weapons and hardware in 2013.
