India and Fiji signed three MoUs on Development Cooperation, Water Resource Management and Standards. The India-Fiji DTAA was signed earlier this month during the visit of Fiji’s Attorney-General. Besides, agreements/MoUs are under consideration including in Agriculture Cooperation, Coconut Industry, Training of Police Personnel and others and these will further deepen our bilateral cooperation.

'We shall be providing Fiji with indelible ink for the elections, vehicles for the Election Commission and training of election and parliamentary officials as our contribution towards Fiji’s march towards a democratic polity,' said the Indian External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid after meeting the visiting Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of Fiji Ratu Inoke Kubuabola here on Wednesday.

Fiji is an important partner of India in its Look East Policy.

'We agreed to enhance cooperation in the area of agriculture, especially in the sugar sector. The upgradation programme provided by India has helped to increase sugar yield, strengthen capacity building and promote technology transfer. I am glad to that we are embarking on a secondline of credit (LoC) for sugar sector and are also considering cooperation on a co-generation project in the sector,' Khurshid said.

He thanked Fiji for providing assistance during the visit of two ships from India for monitoring from the Pacific the launch of the Mars Orbiter Mission in November 2013.

'Fiji is obviously very very important in terms of our launches of this nature. They are very helpful in letting us station our ships in their territorial waters to be able to do the tracking. The equipment of course is on the ships and they pass that later on to the space agency. But we do not have a permanent presence there, unlike our presence in the Arctic for instance or our presence in other parts of the world, because that depends on need basis and of course the technical capacity,' Khurshid said.

Both the ministers also discussed the allocation of a plot of land for the Fiji High Commission in New Delhi and a plot of land for the Indian High Commission and the Indian Cultural Centre in Suva. They agreed to step up cooperation on training of diplomats.

It is for the first time since independence in 1970, Fiji adopted a new Constitution according one-man-one-vote and doing away with the race based approach.

The Fiji Minister Ratu Inoke Kubuabola said : ' We also have our elections this year, as has been mentioned by His Excellency. By September this year, for the first time our people will have a truly democratic election whereby it will be one-man-one-vote. In the past we have always had a divisive Constitution, race-based Constitution whereby an indigenous Fijian would vote for his own Member in the Parliament, an Indian would vote his Member into Parliament, and those who are neither Fijian nor Indian would vote their Members to Parliament. But this year would be it would be for the first time that we will have an election where the Constitution is no longer race based. It is a truly democratic election and we are very excited and looking forward to that.”

The Fiji Minister hoped after the successful completion of the elections the Commonwealth will revoke its suspension.

Ministry of Health of Fiji has entered into a Public Private Partnership with Sahyadri Hospital, Pune for providing tertiary healthcare at the Colonial War Memorial Hospital (CWM) in Suva. Apollo Hospitals have set up a tele-medicine centre at the College of Medicine at the Fiji National University. A number of Fijian students are studying medicine in India.