With India-Canada relations taking a frosty turn, the 53-year-old bi-national organisation, the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute (SICI), jointly funded by the Indian and Canadian governments with offices in Delhi and Calgary, faces an uncertain future.
The chill in relations threatens to cast a shadow over SICI’s academic exchange programmes. The impact is already visible: the abrupt suspension of visa processing services in Canada has compelled SICI to indefinitely postpone an agriculture conference in November for which it was expecting a delegation of Canadian scientists to visit India.
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SICI is essentially a consortium of Indian and Canadian institutions, and is mandated by the Indian and Canadian governments to promote, facilitate and nurture academic linkages, collaborations & exchanges, research partnerships between the two countries. The 53-year old institute became bi-national in 2005 and its presidentship alternates between India and Canada. “Getting a visa might be hard for faculty from Canada,” Professor Pavneesh Madan, the current President — who is a Canadian — of the Executive Council of SICI told The Indian Express on Friday. Madan teaches Veterinary Practice at University of Guelph in Ontario and was appointed as the president of the institute earlier this year.
“We were supposed to have a conference in Coimbatore in November end, and we were hoping to carry some of our Canadian scientists with us to that meeting. It was going to be an agri-cluster meeting,” Madan said. “Once this conflict happened, we knew that a lot of Canadian faculty would be hesitant, first of all, getting a visa might be difficult for them. And secondly, there is some kind of a rule that once there is an advisory given against a country, a lot of travel insurance companies actually do not give insurance or they charge a higher premium on the insurance. So, we had to postpone the conference for now.”
Madan said that he was worried that a diplomatic rift might lead to a situation where SICI comes to be perceived as primarily Canadian or primarily Indian, with the risk of both nations disengaging from their support for the institute.
