It was a weekend but these nine industrialists did not want to have a lazy morning. At 8 am sharp on a surprisingly sunny-monsoon Saturday they entered the Taj Palace hotel to have a cuppa with the US secretary of state Hillary Clinton. As expected there was tight security and they had to bear with it, “She (Clinton) greeted everybody very warmly after which we sat down to a semi-round table discussion,” said vice-chairperson of the Piramal Life Sciences and director Piramal Group, Swati Piramal, one of those who met Clinton on Saturday. All the participants discussed the various corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects they have undertaken.

The meeting lasted for about an hour, in which she discussed various issues ranging from bi-lateral trade, telecommunications, banking, healthcare to education, micro finance and climate change. Clinton said the US intends to take its strategic and economic cooperation with India to a new high by launching an important dialogue on the ‘five pillars’. “We see the dialogue that we are embarking upon as extremely important and is based on the five pillars which are areas of strategic importance, agriculture, health care, science and technology and education,” Clinton said.

Discussions with India Inc on climate change and clean energy were “extremely productive”, Clinton later said at a press conference. She said the US and developed countries “have made mistakes that have contributed significantly leading to the problems that we face of climate change” and hoped that India would not repeat those mistakes. Others present in the meeting included RIL chairman Mukesh Ambani, the chiefs of India’s two largest banks, OP Bhatt of SBI and Chanda Kochhar of ICICI Bank, and Sudha Murthy, wife of Infosys founder N R Narayana Murthy.

... contd.