Czech-India Technology Days

Czech-Indian commercial relations have a long tradition with roots reaching back to the interwar period, when Great Britain ruled India as a colony. After India gained independence in 1947 relations markedly intensified due to India’s status as one of the developing world’s most important countries as well as to the alignment of both countries’ political-economic views in the 1960s and 1970s. India established diplomatic relations with the former Czechoslovakia on 18 November 1947, and later recognised the independent Czech Republic immediately upon its creation on 1 January 1993, again establishing diplomatic relations with the newly separate Czech state. Today, India has very good economic relations with the Czech Republic, which is seen as a successor of Czechoslovakia and thus as a traditional supplier of mechanical-engineering products and a partner of India in the area of commercial and economic cooperation and in the country’s industrialisation since it gained independence.

In the past, Czech firms built in India a range of investment units, such as the metallurgy plant in Ranchi, a machine-tool factor in Ajmer, the Zetor-Hindustan tractor works, the Jawa motorcycle factory in Mysore, the power-generation equipment (turbines) plant in Hyderabad, the Ennore power plant in Madras and the rolled-section mill in Vishakapatnam. Czech suppliers also delivered to India a full range of mechanical-engineering products (diesel generators; Tatra trucks; machine tools; food-production equipment; and textile, printing, leather-working and shoe-production machines) and non-mechanical goods (products of iron and steel, plastic materials, glass).