US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will travel next month to India for annual bilateral economic talks and to Japan for IMF-World Bank meetings, the Treasury Department said Wednesday. Geithner will begin a two-day visit to India in Delhi on October 9, where he will join Indian Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram in the third annual meeting of the US-India Economic and Financial Partnership.
Geithner also will take part in a discussion hosted by the Confederation of Indian Industry and the US-India Business Council, the department said in a statement. On October 10, the Treasury secretary was scheduled to travel to Mumbai, India's financial center, to meet with Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Duvvuri Subbarao and Indian business leaders.
The world's two largest democracies have been stepping up co-operation on issues as diverse as Afghanistan and higher education, but US businesses have been disappointed by the pace of economic liberalisation in India. The Treasury said that Geithner would be in Tokyo on October 11-13 for the annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.