Anchored at a bay in the Chennai port, its sails all down, bobbing gently in the water, the ship, Clipper Stad Amsterdam, is an unlikely venue for a meeting of Chennai businessmen and bureaucrats with Dutch Ambassador Marisa Gerards. Docked in the city port for a series of events under the banner of Netherlands meets Chennai, the Dutch wanted to showcase the ship, which is going round the world, and discuss bilateral relations and, more importantly, trade.
On Wednesday, despite the cyclone brewing in the bay, the rains stayed away, with gusty winds rippling the waters. The Clipper, 76 metres in length, features 31 sails, and is manned by a 30-member crew. Recreating the sailing ships of yore, the Clipper, with a steel hull not wooden, is on a trip round the world for two years and docked in Chennai after stopovers in Bali and Singapore.
Expanding ties
One descends a grand mahogany staircase from the deck, where the sails are folded up, to the longroom, all in gleaming teak and brass. “The Netherlands and India have a thriving economic relationship,” declares Ambassador Gerards, “We have about 300 Dutch companies active here in India and quite a few multinationals as well such as Philips and Shell. There’s quite some investments from Indian companies in the Netherlands as well and there’s a lot happening in the IT sector.” There are around 350 Indian companies invested in the Netherlands, many of them in the Amsterdam area and quite a few of them are software companies ranging from TCS and Cognizant to LatentView Analytics and ChargeBee.
“There’s a lot going on in the innovation side and there’s really room to expand and do more,” says Gerards. “We are a small country with 17 million people but because we’re so high on the innovation index it’s interesting for India to do business with the Dutch because there are areas where we can really team up. And then sectors that are important for India are also sectors where we are very strong, like agriculture, water management, energy and the health sector,” she adds.
The ambassador says the Dutch are exploring green hydrogen as an alternative fuel and it is looking to establish an import-export corridor for green hydrogen from the port of Rotterdam. “It’s a gateway and the biggest port in Europe and it has a huge hinterland where you can transport easily to Germany, to France,” she says. “The gas that we found in the northern part of our country we pumped it up for decades and we have a whole distribution system and now that these fields are empty and we can use this system to transport green hydrogen.” This could be of interest to India when green hydrogen is produced commercially.