 The story of Indo-US relations cannot be appreciated without looking at the numbers of Indians who have travelled to and settled in the United States over the last century. While about 2,000 people immigrated to the US from India in the 1950s, the number jumped to a quarter of a million by the 80s and has crossed 2 million now. Most of the migrants belong to the professional classes. They are today one of the most powerful socio-economic groups in American society. Since our independence, there has been a steady flow of Indian students travelling to the US. In most cases, they stayed back for want of better opportunities at home. In India, today they are in influential positions both in industry and academia. That in turn has led to further improvement in Indo-US relations despite the political ups and downs over the years. Indian educational institutions too have begun to attract a new generation of American students. I'm excited to see how people live here in India and learn about the traditions and maybe learn a little bit of the language but I'm especially interested because this is a very good place to study some of the diseases that I'm interested in and so the project that I'll be doing is especially relevant to this area. Three areas we are emphasizing on. One is in the knowledge-based industries. Second area is in the agriculture and especially the agricultural research. The third area on which we are working in close cooperation is the transfer of technology. The regular flow of college students has helped foster an environment of openness and questioning. This has broken down the prejudices that existed earlier. So these institutional arrangements have provided the arrangements for greater interaction between India and US. Various forum in which the exchange of opinions takes place, joint economic forum, joint dialogue at political level, strategic partnership. These are the instrumentalities through which relationships in various areas are expanding very fast. While economics has always been the basis of growth in Indo-US relations, it is only in the last decade that this has been appreciated and recognized. Especially over the last 10, 12 years post reform, there has been a steady shift into value added products. Today, a large segment of Indians are working for domestic firms that are back-end offices of US companies. They are involved in medical transcriptions, call centers and internal job processing. This backroom work is of vital importance to the US economy. Last 15 years, cultural artists have performed in both countries. Many Indian artists are household names in America while others have chosen the US as their second home. It is also significant that in recent times American artists have reciprocated this. In India, as I was coming up as an artist, slowly, one by one, people would be moved, touched by a performance and because they could separate the dance from the dancer, I was able to gradually get my acceptance here. The Indo-US agreement on civil nuclear energy cooperation is icing on the cake as far as bilateral relations between India and the US is concerned. Considered probably the greatest achievement of both the Manmohan Singh government and the Bush administration, this is a big leap towards sealing the relations between the two countries. The history, depth and contours of people-to-people collaboration are working best for India. Today, we are focusing on areas of engagement and cooperation with an eye to the future.