Rajnath to leave for Uzbekistan on Nov.1 to participate at SCO meeting

Speed Post News Network

New Delhi : Defence Minister Rajnath Singh will leave for Tashkent, Uzbekistan, on November 1, 2019, to attend a key meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and participate in bilateral engagements with the Uzbekistan Government.

Rajnath will represent India at the meeting of Council of Heads of Government (CHG) of SCO at Tashkent on November 2, 2019. The leaders participating at the meeting are expected to focus their discussions on the multilateral economic cooperation in the SCO region. India is actively engaged in various SCO cooperation dialogue mechanisms and further developing multilateral cooperation within the SCO framework, according to a PIB release.

This will be the third CHG meeting after India became a member of SCO. The last two CHG meetings were held between November 30- December 1, 2017, at Sochi in Russia, and October 11-12, 2018, at Dushanbe in Tajikistan.

Rajnath will have bilateral engagements on November 2-3. He will hold a meeting with Major General Kurbanov Bakhodir Nizamovich, Minister of Defence of Uzbekistan, to discuss issues of bilateral defence cooperation. It may be noted that Armies of the two countries would be participating in the first-ever India-Uzbekistan joint exercise ‘Dostlik 2019’. The exercise will be conducted from November 4-13, 2019.