Union FM Nirmala Sitharaman to visit Qatar for annual AIIB Board of Governors meeting

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will embark on a three-day visit to Qatar, leading the delegation comprising Finance Ministry officials. | Photo Credit: BIJOY GHOSH

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will embark on a three-day visit to Qatar, leading the delegation comprising Finance Ministry officials.

Announcing Sitharaman's visit, the Ministry of Finance wrote in a post on X that the Finance Minister will be attending the 11th Annual Meeting of the Board of Governors of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, scheduled to be held on Monday in Doha, as the Indian Governor. As part of her visit, she will also hold several bilateral meetings with the AIIB President and her counterparts from various nations.

Union Minister for Finance and Corporate Affairs Smt. @nsitharaman will embark on an official visit to Qatar from 27th to 29thSeptember, 2026. The Union Finance Minister is leading the delegation comprising of Ministry of Finance officials.During the visit, FM Smt. @nsitharaman… pic.twitter.com/wA48MGv1iw

Earlier in March, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman met Zou Jiayi, the new President of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), here in the national capital, where they discussed strengthening the India-AIIB partnership. Representing the second-largest shareholder in AIIB, Sitharaman emphasised the need to scale up investments in AIIB member countries, particularly low-income countries, through various innovative financing and non-financing instruments.

The Union Finance Minister also highlighted India's continued focus on infrastructure-led growth under the Union Budget, and both discussed the importance of enhanced collaboration with AIIB through early upstream services in the infrastructure sector in India. Among other issues, the Union minister stressed AIIB's role in developing the capital markets, expediting the approvals of projects in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, and setting up a regional office in India, given the scale of AIIB's operations here.

According to the AIIB website, it began operations in 2016 with 57 founding Members (37 regional and 20 non-regional). By the end of 2020, it had 103 approved Members representing approximately 79 per cent of the global population and 65 per cent of global GDP.

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