Mangoes stand piled high in red, orange and green stacks, a traditional sight on the roadsides of Senegal during the harvest season.
Few here know the “king of fruits” came originally from India. But most are aware of a more recent import, the Tata bus, fast becoming as common as mangoes on the streets of the capital Dakar and a symbol of India’s growing presence in West Africa.
“Increasingly we’re focusing on West Africa and southern Africa and the SADC (Southern African Development Community) countries,” Parbati Sen Vyas, India’s ambassador to Senegal and four neighboring countries, said in an interview.
“We are looking at these countries because they are rich in resources, but there is a very significant political role also.”
Indian traders and businessmen have lived and worked for generations in eastern and southern Africa, where many of their countrymen moved as laborers for Britain’s former colonies.
But links with the continent have taken on what Vyas called "a new dimension ... a new vitality” in recent years as firms have broken traditional geographical and industrial boundaries.
India’s role mirrors that of neighboring Asian giant China, which has launched a diplomatic and trading offensive to win friends on the resource-rich continent and secure supplies of oil and other minerals to fuel its fast-expanding economy.
“We don’t compete with China — China has more resources. In a more modest way we have a foothold here in these West African countries. It is a commitment to mutual cooperation, mutual benefit,” Vyas said.
‘Aggressive approach’
A glance around Dakar shows that presence is expanding.
Tata buses from a local assembly plant are gradually replacing the thousands of brightly painted but decrepit minibuses, and Indian construction firms are moving in.
Industries Chimiques du Senegal (ICS), the country’s biggest industrial complex, is a joint venture involving Senegal, India and India’s IFFCO farmers’ fertilizer cooperative. It exports much of its phosphate output to India.
India’s biggest tractor maker, Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd, recently announced plans for a plant in neighboring Gambia, saying Africa was important to its global plans.
And in Ivory Coast, India plans to invest $1 billion over five years in oil exploration and mining, despite the country being cut in two since a brief civil war erupted in 2002.
“When the opportunity is there, Indian companies can do as well as or better than any other country. That is what lies behind our new aggressive approach,” Amarendra Khatua, Indian ambassador to Ivory Coast, told Reuters.
Focus: economic and diplomatic
The primary focus is economic: to secure supplies of raw materials and markets for Indian exports. But there is a growing diplomatic role as globalization and United Nations reform make winning friends — even poor ones - ever more important.
“India’s profile in the world has increased in the last few years,” said Vyas, who also covers Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mali and Mauritania.
“We’ve actively asked them for support for our permanent (U.N.) Security Council seat. And we’ve also assured them of our support for an African seat, a permanent seat, on the Security Council,” she said.
India is also busily drumming up support for Shashi Tharoor, its nominee for U.N. secretary-general, who was among candidates wooing delegates at an African Union summit in Gambia in July.
Big business, big money
Big investments get top-level backing, like planned multibillion dollar oil investments in Nigeria, which is India’s top source of oil and has guaranteed long-term supplies.
Salt-to-software conglomerate Tata is spearheading expansion on the continent from South Africa, which promotes links with India and Brazil via a three-way alliance. Tata trucks are the second-most-popular medium commercial vehicles in South Africa and a Tata subsidiary is buying into a second phone network.
Meanwhile generic pharmaceutical exports to Africa are soaring, and have helped slash the price of AIDS treatments.
But growing economic power can also bring Indian firms into conflict with local politicians and rival foreign entrepreneurs.
Lebanese businessmen, long the trading power in much of West Africa, are being squeezed as Indian traders expand beyond the scrap metal trade which first drew many of them here.
“We have left commerce to go into the real estate business because the Indians and the Chinese are taking over trade,” said Mohamed Fawaz, a member of a well-established Lebanese business family in Guinea’s capital Conakry.
In Zambia, Indian investors bought a privatized copper mine only for it to close down a year later amid recriminations over asset-stripping after vital machinery was sold off for scrap.
Here for the long haul
But officials insist India is here for the long haul.
New Delhi is giving Indian firms a shoo-in to African markets by pouring funds into aid projects like its TEAM-9 initiative, which provides $500 million for technology, power, health and food security projects in a group of West African countries — so long as Indian contractors are used.
“West Africa is a long-term investment destination for us,” Talmiz Ahmad, an Indian oil ministry official, said last year.
