The Infrastructure & Smart City Committee had a detailed interaction with Mr. Arun Kumar, Assistant Secretary Commerce, at the office of Mr Arun Jain, Chairman – AmCham Infrastructure & Smart City Committee and Managing Director, Fluor Daniel India Pvt. Ltd. in Gurgaon on 19th May.

The discussion centered on the upcoming U.S. – India Strategic & Commercial Dialogue and one of its main agenda items will be U.S. – India collaboration on infrastructure development programs. Under this, the need for having inclusive consortiums, policy advocacy issues, aggregating various funding fronts, outreach to state government leaders such as Chief Ministers and Chief Secretaries, standards, the need for a central procurement reforms committee, handholding agencies for helping lagging cities enhance their smart city proposals, affordable innovation and demonstration of successful benchmark U.S. cities as examples, were discussed. Assistant Secretary Kumar participated and responded on several key points on how best the challenges and bottlenecks in the current and emerging infrastructure opportunities may be strategically addressed and will also feed into the hi-level discussion between the two governments in the U.S.- India Strategic and Commercial Dialogue.

Participating U.S. companies included Fluor Daniel, AECOM, IBM, United Technologies Corporation, Honeywell, HP, Ingersoll Rand, Protiviti Consulting, Abbott, Boston Scientific, BTI Consultants and Louis Berger.