VADODARA, India — Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Spanish counterpart Pedro Sanchez inaugurated India’s first private military aircraft plant on Monday, boosting New Delhi’s ambitions of growing local manufacturing in its defense and aerospace industries.
Sanchez was welcomed to the country with a roadshow in Gujarat state’s Vadodara city where hundreds of people cheered and waved banners.
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The two leaders then launched the Tata Aircraft Complex, the manufacturing hub that will produce the Airbus C-295 transport military aircraft in collaboration with Airbus Spain and to be deployed by the Indian air force.
Sanchez said the project was a triumph of Modi’s vision “to turn India into an industrial powerhouse and a magnet for investment and business-to-business collaboration.”
“This partnership between Airbus and Tata will contribute to the progress of the Indian aerospace industry and will open new doors for the arrival of other European companies,” he added.
The chairman of Tata conglomerate, Natarajan Chandrasekaran, hailed it as a historic day for the country’s defense sector and credited the late Ratan Tata, the industrialist and former chairman who died earlier this month, for conceiving the idea more than a decade ago.
Under a $2.5 billion deal signed in 2021, Airbus will deliver the first 16 of the aircraft from its final assembly line in Seville, Spain.
VILNIUS, Lithuania — Lithuania’ s center-left opposition parties celebrated victory on Monday after prevailing over the center-right ruling coalition in the final round of national elections.
With 100% of votes counted from Sunday’s polls, the Social Democrats won 52 seats in the 141-seat parliament, known as the Seimas, ending the four-year rule of the Homeland Union government led by conservative Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė.
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The Social Democrats will start talks on forming a majority cabinet with two smaller center-left parties, the Democratic Union and the Union of Peasants and Greens, which won respectively 14 and 8 seats.