Foreign Minister: From March, Bulgarian visas will be issued in 15 cities in India
Bulgarian visas will be issued in 15 cities in India from March 2019, Foreign Minister Ekaterina Zaharieva said after talks on February 17 with her Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj.
Swaraj is the first Indian Foreign Minister to visit Bulgaria in two decades, Bulgaria’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
“With the lowest tax in the EU, good infrastructure and hospitable people, Bulgaria can become India’s door to Europe,” Zaharieva told Swaraj, the statement said.
The two foreign ministers agreed that the areas with great potential for development in bilateral relations included high-tech, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, the food industry and tourism.
Zaharieva that a Bulgarian company is already successfully developing a business under the Make In India program, another supplies internet to more than 200 000 users in Delhi, and a Bulgarian plant is producing medicines in India.
Thanks to these and other successful initiatives, there was an upward trend in bilateral trade, the Foreign Ministry statement said. In the first 10 months of 2018, there was 25 per cent growth on an annual basis.
More than 14 500 Indians, an increase of about 23 per cent on an annual basis, visited Bulgaria in 2018, Zaharieva said.
On February 7, Zaharieva said after talks with representatives of the Bulgarian-Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry that Bulgarian visas would soon be available in an additional 15 cities in China.
Currently, visas for Bulgaria are only available in China’s capital city Beijing and in Shanghai.
The cities in which Bulgarian visas will be obtainable in the future are Guangzhou, Jinan, Kunming, Nanjing, Beijing, Xi An, Wuhan, Fuzhou, Hangzhou, Changsha, Chongqing, Chengdu, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Shenyang, according to Zaharieva.
(Photo of Sushma Swaraj and Ekaterina Zaharieva: mfa.bg)