India Initiative

India’s strategic, economic and geopolitical importance is growing rapidly. Its choices on technology, energy, trade, security and the international order increasingly matter to Canada. Yet Canadian understanding of modern India has often been episodic and narrowly framed.

CSS’s India Initiative has two purposes. The first is to deepen India competence in Canada through a dedicated Competence Program, giving federal and provincial officials, business leaders and researchers a more sophisticated read on modern India: how its economy is changing, where its strategic priorities sit, how it makes decisions, and the harder questions of governance and rule of law. Competence of that kind is what allows Canada to engage with a clear sense of its own interests.

The second purpose is to advance the bilateral relationship itself, by developing the ideas, partnerships and practical initiatives that make a Canada–India relationship more strategic, more resilient and more capable of producing concrete results. The Initiative combines research, executive education, public programming, and strategic dialogues, built with Indian institutions as a bilateral network rather than a Canadian program, so that engagement is sustained beyond a single visit or announcement.