India’s road to 2047: Lessons from Singapore

THE close ties between India and Singapore have a history rooted in strong commercial, cultural and people-to-people links across a millennium.

Singapore is India’s largest trade partner in the Asean region. It is also India’s leading source of foreign direct investment. The inaugural meeting of the India-Singapore ministerial roundtable in 2022 provided an ambitious road map for strengthening the strategic partnership between the two nations in a range of emerging areas such as digital connectivity, fintech, green economy, green hydrogen, skill development and food productivity.

Last year, India’s real-time retail payment system, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), and the equivalent network in Singapore, PayNow, were integrated to enable faster remittances between the two countries at a competitive rate. As we progressively add more users, the PayNow-UPI linkage continues to facilitate trade and people-to-people links between the two countries.