India will build a satellite signal receiving station in Vietnam from April.

India plans to build a satellite receiving station in Ho Chi Minh City, a step forward in the South Asian country's eastward strategy, from April this year.

The Asahi Shimbun newspaper on March 29 quoted senior officials from the Indian Ministry of External Affairs as saying that India will build a data processing center in Ho Chi Minh City, a data receiving and transmission facility on the outskirts of the city. Construction of the facilities is expected to begin around April to June this year.

The station, jointly operated by India and ASEAN countries, is tasked with providing data collected from Indian earth observation satellites to countries in the Southeast Asian region.

An Indian satellite.

According to sources, India will bear the cost of construction and operation for the first five years, estimated at around $22 million. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will soon activate the station and connect it with another facility in Indonesia.

Senior Indian officials stressed that the satellite station will not be targeted at any specific country. However, this is seen as a move to strengthen cooperation with Vietnam and ASEAN countries to monitor the situation in the East Sea in the context of China's increasing activities to consolidate its illegal sovereignty.

Since 2014, India has been one of the countries that has always declared its support for freedom of navigation and overflight in the East Sea. As a non-claimant country in the East Sea, India calls on parties to resolve their differences through dialogue and peaceful means, in compliance with international law, including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

Vietnam has been stepping up defense cooperation with India in recent years. At a meeting within the framework of the summit in October 2014, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung and his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi agreed that New Delhi would provide patrol boats to Vietnam./.

According to tintuc.vn