New Delhi: When Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits the US on June 7-8 in the course of his five-nation tour starting on Saturday, he will be among the few close world leaders that President Barack Obama is inviting in the last year of his presidency.
“President Obama spoke to the Prime Minister and mentioned to him that this year he was inviting some leaders with whom he had a very close and productive working relationship to visit him in the United States,” Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar said at a pre-departure media briefing here on Friday.
This will be Modi’s second bilateral visit to the US after his visit in September 2014. Jaishankar said that in many ways it would be a sort of “consolidation visit” after Obama and Modi working on the US-India relationship in the last two years.
After departing on Saturday morning, Modi will stop over in Herat in Afghanistan where he will, jointly with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, inaugurate the India-Afghan Friendship Dam, earlier known as Salma Dam, which has been rebuilt with Indian aid.
Originally constructed in 1976 on the Hari river basin, the Salma Dam suffered extensive damage during the civil war in Afghanistan. “It was built at a cost of approximately Rs 1,700 crore,” Jaishankar said.-PTI
