Speaker Pillay calls on Indian colleague |11 August 2017

Speaker Pillay with Smt. Sumitra Mahajan

National Assembly Speaker Patrick Pillay and his accompanying delegation were received by Honourable Speaker of India’s Lok Sabha Smt. Sumitra Mahajan yesterday.

The two sides held bilateral discussions aimed at further expanding the interactions between the parliamentarians of the two sides.

She also hosted a banquet in honour of the visiting parliamentary delegation from Seychelles.

Speaker Pillay and his delegation are in New Delhi, India to attend the Conference of Speakers and Presiding Officers of the Commonwealth (CSPOC).

The conference brings together the speakers and presiding officers of the national parliaments of the independent sovereign states of the Commonwealth. It was created in 1969 as an initiative of then Speaker of the House of Commons of Canada, the Honourable Lucien Lamoureux. Since its inception, Canada has provided CSPOC with a secretariat to support its activities. The conference is an independent group and has no formal affiliation with the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, the Commonwealth Secretariat or the Commonwealth Heads of Government.

CSPOC operates on a two-year cycle, holding a conference of the full membership every two years, usually early in January, and a meeting of the standing committee at the same time the intervening year. The conference aims to: maintain, foster, and encourage impartiality and fairness on the part of speakers and presiding officers of parliaments; promote knowledge and understanding of parliamentary democracy in its various forms; and develop parliamentary institutions.

Yesterday, the parliamentary delegation from Seychelles also called on the Indian President Ram Nath Kovind at Rashtrapati Bhavan and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi.

Speaker Pillay and his delegation during their call on PM Modi