The EuroIndia Centre aims at being a unique institutional platform to foster civil society dialogue and co-operation between India and Europe, acting as a catalyst of the immense pent up expectations existing among Europeans and Indians alike for enhanced interaction; be it individuals, enterprises, academia, research institutions, NGO s, civic bodies….

Their valuable energy and enthusiasm will thus be channeled by the EuroIndia Centre into concrete initiatives on issues and projects that are not adequately addressed in existing official Euro-Indian arenas. Such is the Euro-Indian relationship at the local level of Cities, Regions and States, which has been lying unattended for decades. The result is that today they enjoy poor working relationship and hardly any worthwhile partnership with one another, in spite of the huge potential of such local level relationship across multiple sectors, as witnessed the World over.

This is the reason why, at the behest of the Prime Minister of India and founding President Emeritus of the Centre, Dr Manmohan Singh, the Centre launched a Civic Initiative in 2006.

His government had indeed launched in the same year the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission to modernize the 63 largest cities of India, the first such programme since India s independence. He then wished that the Centre could play its part in this ambitious programme: "This challenging mission [the N.U.R.M.] would be greatly facilitated if our cities could imbibe the wealth of experience and the state-of-the-art and know-how that European cities have developed over decades of being confronted to similar social and economic pressures." That led the Centre to organize its first EuroIndia Forum in Goa in February 2007, followed by a second Forum in April 2008 and two missions of Indian cities to Europe.

The Centre then unveiled an ambitious F.L.Y. A. Green K.I.T.E. strategy to build a unique institutional exchange platform at local level, covering Green Initiatives, Knowledge management, Investment and business, Tourism and culture and Excellence in urban governance, to ensure sustainable win-win co-operations between Cities, Regions and States of Europe and India and their stakeholders: companies, academic and research institutes, NGOs, etc. and to open broad channels of communication between their civil societies.

This has resulted in several events and missions being organized every year in Europe or India, such as the annual EuroIndia Summit.

The Centre has pledged to use its platform to foster fruitful Euro-Indian exchanges, co-operation and partnership on critical issues of common concern where the local level has a paramount role to play, such as together fighting climate change, improving living conditions in our cities and their environmentally sustainable development.

This had led to the launch at the 4th EuroIndia Summit in Halle in October 2010 of the path-breaking EuroIndia Environmentally Sustainable City Award (ESCA) that seeks to promote higher standards of sustainable development in cities in Europe and India.