As a follow-up of our EuroIndia Fora and Summit, the need was felt to organize follow-up missions by Indian Partner-cities to their European counterparts and to corporate event Partners and vice-versa, as we strongly believe that seeing is believing.

In coordination with our Indian Partner, the Confederation of Indian Industry, we resolved to undertake turn-key missions, exclusively reserved to event Partners and institutional members of the Centre.

The first such mission was organized on 10-16 October 2007, whereby Ahmedabad, Kolkata and the State of Goa visited Lyon, Frankfurt and La Rochelle to review their best practices in four priority sectors identified in the preceding EuroIndia Goa Forum, namely City heritage conservation, water supply and sanitation, solid waste treatment and urban transportation.

A second mission involved member city Ahmedabad visiting member cities Valladolid and Halle to sign a partnership agreement in October 2008. This was immediately followed by the Valladolid Mayor’s official visit to Ahmedabad in December.

In the wake of the Valladolid Summit on 4-6 October 2010, the Centre organized an extension to Madrid and Paris for the powerful official Indian civic and corporate delegation.

It is expected that such path-breaking missions will lead to further exchanges of technical and topic-specific missions, to richer exchanges in the ensuing events and to actual co-operation programmes and contractual engagements, involving all concerned city stake-holders: Cities, companies, research and academic institutions, NGO’s, etc.