REPRESENTING India at the Annual Meet of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) at St Petersburg last week, the Power Minister, Mr Sushilkumar Shinde, called for breaking barriers that inhibit trade and investment flows between the countries in the SCO zone. He said SCO should address the problem of limited connectivity through regional solutions. He said that India was ready to cooperate to find viable solutions to this problem and contribute to the endeavour to build bridges between Central and South Asia.

Drawing attention to the challenges faced by the world economy, Mr Shinde said that there was a very real danger of a spillover of the sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone to the rest of the world. He said that in a globally interconnected world, the SCO region could not remain unaffected by such developments. The Minister added that as nations deal with the short term problems of instability, they must also face the challenge of engineering a broad-based recovery and sustainable growth both in industrialized and developing economies. He said that the SCO countries are strengthened by the complementarities of their resources and must find the most suitable path to growth for themselves.