Prime Minister of Singapore Lawrence Wong on a three-day visit to India

On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of India-Singapore diplomatic relations, Prime Minister of the Republic of Singapore Lawrence Wong arrived on a three-day visit to India on 2 September 2025 at the invitation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

• Both leaders have a program to hold bilateral talks. During this visit, the Prime Minister of Singapore will also meet President Droupadi Murmu.
• The Ministry of External Affairs said that Prime Minister Wong’s visit is taking place on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of India-Singapore diplomatic relations and reaffirms the continued commitment of both countries to further strengthen this partnership.
• In addition, the armies of India and Singapore have conducted their joint military exercise ‘Bold Kurukshetra 2025’ in Jodhpur, which focused on strengthening operational procedures in mechanized warfare.
• Singapore is India’s largest trading partner within ASEAN and, being a major source of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), is also one of the biggest contributors in external commercial borrowing and foreign portfolio investment.

Early relations

• The history of close relations between India and Singapore is based on strong commercial, cultural, and people-to-people ties for over a millennium.
• Modern relations are credited to Sir Stamford Raffles, who in 1819 established a trading station in Singapore on the Malacca Strait route, which later became a crown colony.
• It was governed from Kolkata until 1867. India was one of the first countries to recognize Singapore in 1965. In the same year, diplomatic relations between the two also began.

Law and dispute resolution

• Chief Justice of Singapore Sundaresh Menon visited India on 28 January 2023 for the annual lecture at India’s first Supreme Court Day celebration.
• Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud also paid an official visit to Singapore from 07–10 September 2023 for the inauguration of the Singapore-India Judicial Roundtable Conference.
• On 14 March 2024, India and Singapore signed a Memorandum of Understanding on cooperation in the field of law and dispute resolution.

India-Singapore economic relations

• Singapore is India’s sixth largest trading partner (2023–24), accounting for 3.2% of India’s total trade. In the financial year 2023–24, Singapore was the largest source of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in India.

Skill development:

• There is active cooperation between India and Singapore to establish skill development centers in various sectors.
• With public-private support, skill center projects have been completed at 6 locations—Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, Rajasthan (Udaipur), Assam (Guwahati), Odisha (Bhubaneswar), and Telangana (Hyderabad).
• 2 projects are still ongoing in Madhya Pradesh (Bhopal) and Gujarat (Gandhinagar).

Fintech:

• A commercial and technical arrangement has been made for the acceptance of RuPay cards in Singapore.
• The UPI-PayNow linkage is another historic development in the field of cross-border fintech.
• Singapore is the first country with which India has launched a cross-border person-to-person (P2P) payment facility.

Science and technology cooperation

• ISRO has launched several satellites of Singapore, including Singapore’s first indigenously built micro-satellite in 2011. Singapore co-hosted the ASEAN-India Women Scientists Conference in April 2024.
• India and Singapore organized an e-workshop in July 2024 in the field of digital health and medical technologies.