New Delhi: India’s Minister of Defence Rajnath Singh will leave for Tashkent, Uzbekistan tomorrow to attend a key meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and participate in bilateral engagements with the Uzbekistan government.

Rajnath Singh will represent India in the meeting of Council of Heads of Government (CHG) of SCO at Tashkent on Nov. 2. The leaders participating in the meeting are expected to focus their discussions on the multilateral economic cooperation in the SCO region.

India is actively engaged in various SCO cooperation dialogue mechanisms and further developing multilateral cooperation within the SCO framework.

This will be the third CHG meeting after India became a member of SCO. The last two CHG meetings were held between Nov. 30-Dec. 1, 2017 at Sochi in Russia and Oct. 11-12, 2018 at Dushanbe in Tajikistan.

The Indian defence minister will have bilateral engagements on Nov. 2-3. He will hold a meeting with Major General Kurbanov Bakhodir Nizamovich, Minister of Defence of Uzbekistan, to discuss issues of bilateral defence cooperation.

The armies of the two countries would be participating in the first-ever India-Uzbekistan joint exercise ‘Dostlik 2019’ to be held from Nov. 4-13.