Prime Minister Narendra Modi began a four-day Central Asia visit on August 29, opening with a bilateral trip to Uzbekistan before heading to Kyrgyzstan for the 26th Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Summit.
The Tashkent agenda, delegation-level talks with President Shavkat Mirziyoyev covering trade, investment, defence, digital connectivity, healthcare, energy, education, critical minerals, pharmaceuticals and space cooperation, reads less like a routine bilateral visit and more like a deliberate attempt to diversify India’s access to Central Asian resources and markets.
Critical minerals in particular are worth watching here: India has been actively working to reduce dependence on a small number of countries for the raw materials that feed its electronics, EV battery and defence manufacturing ambitions, and Central Asia’s mineral wealth makes it a natural, if underused, partner in that effort.
Bilateral trade between India and Uzbekistan currently sits close to $1 billion, a modest figure relative to the scope of the agenda being discussed. That gap between ambition and current trade volume is itself the story: this is a relationship being actively built up rather than one already delivering at scale.
The subsequent SCO Summit leg in Bishkek adds a second layer, positioning India’s bilateral Central Asia push within a wider multilateral forum that also includes China and Russia, both of which have far deeper existing economic ties to the region.
For founders building anything touching mineral supply chains, pharmaceutical exports or space-adjacent technology, the useful signal isn’t the visit itself but the specific sectors named on the agenda. Government diplomatic priorities tend to precede, by a year or more, the trade and investment facilitation that actually opens a market.
The Bishkek leg is expected to draw a wide roster of leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, alongside representatives from other SCO member states.
PM Modi is also expected to attend the opening ceremony of the sixth World Nomad Games while in Kyrgyzstan, adding a cultural dimension to the multilateral leg of the trip.
Official portrait of PM Narendra Modi, Wikimedia Commons, GODL-India