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By Sally Watson, 30 October 2000 18:00

NEWS The tour will take the minister across the country to Ahmedabad, Calcutta, Delhi, Bombay and India's own 'Silicon Valley', the central city of Bangalore. In an exclusive interview with silicon.com, Hewitt said her trip was about being a "successful marriage broker" between Indian and British business leaders. "It's very much about business-to-business," she stressed. "British companies come here to find new skill sets and new technologies." Although India's high-tech sector currently has much stronger ties with the US, Hewitt aims to promote the shared language, culture and history between the two countries as the building blocks of a mutually beneficial relationship. The trip also aims to generate Indian-led investment back into the UK - positioning Britain as an ecommerce springboard into Europe. "The US has dominated the market in terms of computing," Hewitt admitted, "but European Union market is even bigger in terms of size." According to Roopen Roy, director of PricewaterhouseCoopers India, the growth of e-marketplaces will provide an unprecedented opportunity for companies in India to access global markets. "India has enormous supply capabilities and can leverage a huge knowledge pool," Roy claimed. During the visit, Hewitt will visit a number of Indian government ministers including Omar Farooq Abdullah, minister for state commerce and industry, and Pramod Mahajan, minister for IT. Joe Silva, chairman of Caltiger.com, India's largest private sector ISP, said there is much the Indian government can learn from its UK counterpart. "I'm very impressed by the British government roadmap on ecommerce. India is in the infancy of the net and we have yet to see the kind of traffic that brings the right economies of scale." * silicon.com is the only publication joining the e-minister on her tour of India. Sally Watson, silicon.com's e-technology editor, will be given a unique insight into the working life, and character, of Patricia Hewitt. She will be filing daily, exclusive reports from the front line as the minister attempts to foster closer ties between India and the UK. The first entry from her diary will appear exclusively on silicon.com tomorrow.