We're on the same page on knowledge, capacity

The second ministerial meeting of the India-EU Trade and Technology Council (TTC) on Friday identified six priority sectors for cooperation, including digitalisation, semiconductors and setting ICT standards, said Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission's executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy.

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NEW DELHI: Virkkunen, who is tasked with combating security threats facing the EU and strengthening internal security, said in an interview with Rezaul H Laskar that the 27-member bloc sees India as a key partner for technology and security initiatives. Edited excerpts:

What are the key outcomes of the India-EU meetings, including the second ministerial meeting of TTC?

I think it was very successful because the EU and India are keen to strengthen cooperation, especially in technology. We identified six fields where we want to cooperate more closely. One is digital services because both sides are very developed in digitalisation of public services. In the EU, we are working on the digital wallet and we will work for interoperability between the two systems, for example with electronic signatures and documents. We will have two billion citizens with interoperable electronic services when it comes to public documents and businesses, because in Europe we are also working on business wallets for companies.

The second important sector is semiconductors because it's super important for the EU and India to build up capacities, strengthen value chains and ensure we have strong economic security. AI is something where we want a human-centric approach and make sure technologies are serving citizens and our democracies. We will invest in supercomputers and launch a common project to build up capacity to support research and startups. We will focus on mitigating natural hazards and bioinformatics using supercomputers.