VK Singh to inaugurate two projects in S Africa this week

Minister of State for External Affairs General VK Singh will inaugurate two India-funded welfare projects during his visit to South Africa this week.

Singh will be in South Africa from April 7 to 10 on an official visit.

On Saturday, he will inaugurate the two projects funded by India in Durban, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced for the welfare of the local community in July last year.

A grant of one million rand was provided to establish a kitchen and dining hall at Abalindi, a non-profit organisation which supports the poor, aged people, the terminally ill, AIDS or HIV patients and has facilities including a creche for poor children, an orphanage and a skills development centre for youth.

The project in Inanda, near where Mahatma Gandhi had set up the Phoenix Settlement from where he ran his community projects and led his fight against discrimination, is now complete and will be officially opened for the use of the community.

After this, at the nearby Gandhi Settlement, Singh will inaugurate the Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Information Technology.

A grant of over one million rand was provided by the Indian government for setting up the facility, which is equipped with latest computers and other IT equipment.

Modi had directed the donation on behalf of the people of India after his visit to the Phoenix Settlement last year as an important step to provide education and skill development to the youth of the area.

A day later, Singh will be in Johannesburg to visit the Satyagraha House, a living museum-hotel converted from a house in which Gandhi lived as a lawyer at the turn of the last century.

He will also visit the Constitutional Hill, once the site of the Old Fort Prison where Gandhi, and later Nelson Mandela, were once imprisoned.

The visit will conclude with a concert in Pretoria to mark the 20th anniversary of the Red Fort Declaration, signed by Mandela and then-Indian Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda in New Delhi.

The agreement set the tone for the development of relations in all areas between the two countries after Mandela was installed as the country's first democratic president following decades of international isolation.