NEW DELHI: Australian PM Anthony Albanese has credited PM Narendra Modi with providing energy access to India’s population on a scale that, he said, no other country has achieved before.Talking to former Australian PM Kevin Rudd on Sept 24 at an event organised by Asia Policy Institute in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meetings, Albanese said, “To give Prime Minister Modi credit, more people have been connected with access to energy in India under his reign than has occurred in any decade in any country or any region in human history.”Under the Ujjwala scheme, over 10.5 crore domestic cooking gas connections have been provided since 2016, while the Saubhagya scheme helped electrify over 2.8 crore rural and poor urban households. The PM Surya Ghar Muft Bijli Yojana, the world’s largest domestic rooftop solar initiative, has connected over 50 lakh households with solar energy. Nearly 2.5 million farmers have also benefited from the PM-KUSUM scheme, which promotes solar energy in agriculture through solar-powered irrigation systems.Albanese’s statement comes at a time when energy security is high on India’s agenda, with global supplies facing disruptions amid the ongoing war in West Asia.India diversified its energy supplies from 27 to 41 countries over the past decade to ensure energy security for its population of over 140 crore. This helped it tide over supply disruptions linked to the Strait of Hormuz, which carries a fifth of the world’s total energy trade, amid the West Asia conflict and, more recently, disruptions in the Red Sea. India also imported LNG from Australia when supplies from Gulf nations were scarce.Albanese spoke about India’s growing economic strength and efforts to deepen bilateral ties. He said the India-Australia partnership had been “under-utilised” and that he and PM Modi were “very keen on rectifying that”.“He is someone who we have a strong relationship with. I think there’s a lot more can be done in our economic partnership,” Albanese said.
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Albanese, along with a delegation from the Business Council of Australia, is likely to visit India in Dec for the G’Day Namaste event, where bilateral trade, investment and cooperation in clean energy, education and technology are expected to be discussed.During PM Modi’s visit to Australia in July this year, the two countries issued a joint statement calling for stronger cooperation on reliable energy supplies, renewable energy, supply-chain resilience and electrification. They also agreed on Australian uranium exports to India for its nuclear energy programmes and reaffirmed cooperation on critical minerals and renewable energy.Commerce minister Piyush Goyal recently said that bilateral trade between the two countries stood at $21.09 billion in 2025-26.
