Prime Minister Narendra Modi will join the leaders of the US, Japan, and Australia at the Quad summit in the US later this month as the influential grouping is likely to deliberate on pressing global challenges including the situation in Ukraine.
The summit is likely to take place on September 21 in US President Joe Biden's hometown of Wilmington in Delaware, people familiar with the matter said.
There is no official word so far on the date and venue of the high-profile summit. It was India's turn to host the Quad summit this year. However, the leaders of the grouping decided to hold the summit at a venue convenient to all in view of constraints of a tight calendar.
According to the new plan, India is expected to host the Quad Summit next year.
Modi, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his Japanese counterpart Fumio Kishida are among the world leaders who are traveling to the US to attend the UN's Summit of the Future in New York on September 22 and 23.
The Quad summit is likely to focus on boosting cooperation among the member nations in the Indo-Pacific besides delving into various key challenges facing the globe including the conflict in Ukraine.
The Quad foreign ministers, during wide-ranging talks in Tokyo last July, discussed overall cooperation in the boosting of Indo-Pacific.
Clear as loud was the message from the Quad foreign ministerial meeting to China for the grouping reiterated its abiding commitment to a free, open Indo-Pacific with a determination to work towards a region where no country dominates others, and each state was "free from coercion" in all its forms.
The foreign ministers also announced a plan to expand its ambitious Indo-Pacific Maritime Domain Awareness programme to the Indian Ocean region that would facilitate monitoring the strategic waters.
In New York, Prime Minister Modi is also set to address an Indian community event besides holding talks with a number of world leaders on the sidelines of the UN summit, the people cited above said.
The Summit of the Future will bring together leaders from around the world to forge a new international consensus on how to deliver a "better present and safeguard the future", the UN said.
Effective global cooperation is increasingly critical to our survival but hard to attain in an atmosphere of mistrust in using outdated structures which no longer reflect today's political and economic realities, the UN said.
It said further that the Summit of the Future now was "an opportunity to get back on track.".
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