India-China trade to reach $100B by 2015
 

Bilateral trade between India and China could reach 100 billion dollars in less than 10 years, a Chinese trade official said in a statement released Friday.

"China and India have a history of increasing bilateral trade for the last 10 years," Yu Ping, of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, told a meeting of Indian industry leaders.

"Now we are setting a new target of 100 billon dollars that should be achieved by 2015," said Ping, according to a statement from the Confederation of Indian Industries, which organized the meeting.

Trade between the former rivals, who fought a border war in 1962 but whose ties have blossomed lately, has surged from two billion dollars in 2000-01 to up to 18 billion dollars in the fiscal year ending March, Indian officials say.

With bilateral trade between the two Asian nations growing at 44 percent annually in the past five years, China looks set to overtake the United States as India's largest trading partner.

India's trade with China will hit 20 billion dollars by the end of this year, Ping said, only slightly behind India's trade with the US at 21 billion dollars.