New Delhi: Defence Minister Rajnath Singh leaves for Tashkent on November 1 to attend a key meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and participate in bilateral engagements with the Uzbekistan government.

Singh will represent India in the meeting of Council of Heads of Government (CHG) of SCO at Tashkent on November 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 at Sochi in Russia from November 30-December 1, 2017 and at Dushanbe in Tajikistan on October 11-12, 2018.

The Minister will have bilateral engagements on November 2 and 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’. The 10-day exercise will be conducted from November 4.