President to break the ice at Reykjavik

President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam’s four-nation tour starting from May 22 will be a mix of science and technolgy coupled with diplomacy. He ...

President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam’s four-nation tour starting from May 22 will be a mix of science and technolgy coupled with diplomacy. He will visit Iceland, Switzerland, Russia and Ukraine during his two-week tour.

The Iceland trip will be the first-ever State visit to the Arctic country and Kalam has already discussed with scientists on how India can learn sesemic predictions from Iceland and disaster management from Switzerland.

At Reykjavik, Kalam will interact with scientists in the Earthquake Prediction Centre. He will also be shown techniques of deep-sea fishing, one of the areas of proposed ties discussed when Iceland President Olafur Regnar Grimsson visited India four years ago.

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Kalam’s trip will also be used as an opportunity to announce an expansion of facilities at Actavia, the joint-venture pharmaceutical firm functioning in Iceland.

The visit of an Indian head of State to Berne comes after 25 years. Enthused, the Swiss government has declared the last day of Kalam’s tour (May 27) as Science Day. While the Moscow trip will be the first by an Indian President after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Ukraine tour is the result of a long-pending request from that country.

Ritu Sarin

Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption. Sarin is one of India’s most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over four decades. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999 and since early 2023, a member of its Board of Directors. She has also been a founder member of the ICIJ Network Committee (INC). She has, to begin with, alone, and later led teams which have worked on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, the Uber Files and Deforestation Inc. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops and addressed investigative journalism conferences with a specialisation on collaborative journalism in several countries. ... Read More