Tata, Honeywell's David Cote to co-chair Indo-US CEO Forum

The Indian CEOs would be accompanying Prime Minister Manmohan Singh next week as part of the official delegation. The Prime Minister and US President Barack Obama would be meeting the reconstituted CEOs Forum to get a private sector perspective on how to expand economic cooperation between the two nations.

"Our hope is that the Forum will inform the choices of government leaders, as it has in the past, and thereby enhance our joint competitiveness and ingenuity,” US under secretary of state for political affairs William J Burns said.

There are six new faces from Indian side-- Bharti Group's Sunil Bharati Mittal, SBI chairman OP Bhatt, Venu Srinivisan of TVS Motors, Infosys' S Gopalarishnan, Chanda Kochhar of ICICI Bank, and Preetha Reddy from Apollo Hospitals.

Besides Ratan Tata, the other Indian members of the Forum are Reliance’s Mukesh Ambani, Biocon's Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Analjit Singh of Max India, Deepak Parikh of HDFC and Ashok Ganguly of Firstsource Solutions and ABP.

Besides Honeywell's Cote who is the co-chair with Tata, Citi Group's Vikram Pandit and PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi have been nominated to the CEO Forum by the White House. The final list is yet to be officially released.

Other American CEOs who are believed to have made it to the list include United Technologies' George David, Mike Splinter of Applied Materials, Dow Chemicals' Andrew Liveris, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, McGrow Hill's Terry McGraw III, Charles O Holliday Jr of Dupont, and Paul Jacobs from Qualcumm.

Under-secretarty Burns said the Forum can complement the work of both the governments in industries and disciplines where private sector interests play a prime role in both countries -– in education, science and technology, and on the full range of global economic policy issues facing India and the US.

"We need to harness their creativity to find new solutions for sustained economic growth, which will greatly depend on the move away from old fossil-fuel development to more low carbon, energy efficient alternatives," he had told Carnegie Endowment for Peace early this week.

"The CEO Forum will not only provide advice to our two governments about how we can provide further opportunities for our two private sectors to prosper and work together, but also to work with us on private-public partnerships of all kinds in many of the areas that I talked about,” US assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia Robert Blake had told reporters at a news conference early this week.