Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Mauritian counterpart Pravind Kumar Jugnauth on Thursday jointly inaugurated a major Social Housing Project in the island nation. In the virtual ceremony, both leaders also laid the foundation stone for two other projects including the construction of a college for training of civil servants and a solar power project.
The Civil Service College project, located in Reduit, is funded through a grant support of $4.74 million under a bilateral MoU signed in 2017.
“Once constructed, this will provide a fully equipped and functional facility for the civil servants of Mauritius to undertake various training and skill development programmes. It will further strengthen institutional linkages with India,” a press release from the Government said.
In May 2016, India had extended a grant of $353 million to the Government of Mauritius as Special Economic Package (SEP) for completing five priority projects including the Social Housing Project. Thursday’s event marked completion of all the main projects under SEP.
The solar project involves installation of 8 MW Solar PV Farm covering 25,000 PV cells to generate approximately 14 GWh of green energy annually. The press release claimed that the electricity will help 10,000 Mauritian households with an “estimated avoidance of 13,000 tons of CO2 emissions every year.”
India has collaborated with Mauritius in recent years in building landmark projects like the Metro Express in the island nation that was inaugurated in 2019 by the two Prime Ministers and the new Supreme Court Building of Mauritius that was inaugurated in July 2020.
