Declaration on association of Russian and Indian universities signed in Moscow

The leading Russian and Indian universities have established an association. A declaration to this effect was signed in Moscow on 8 May, following a roundtable meeting of the two countries' university rectors. The signing ceremony was attended by the President of India Shri Pranab Mukherjee.

The association's goal is to pool the universities' efforts to provide the personnel, research and technological backing to the further development of knowledge-based economies in Russia and India. The participating universities plan to promote academic mobility, create joint education programmes and laboratories, organise research conferences and seminars, conduct joint research and cooperate with companies to train personnel for them.

The association will be coordinated by Tomsk State University (Russia) and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay).

Dmitry Livanov, Russian Minister of Education and Science, said at the signing ceremony that the association of universities was expected to boost university cooperation on a bilateral basis and also ties within the BRICS framework as a whole.