The impending EU-India free trade and investment agreements would give a fillip to India-Finland bilateral relations, which have a “lot of room to grow”, Kimmo Lahdevirta, the Finnish ambassador to India, has said.

Trade with the Nordic country is pegged at €3 billion, with at least 100 Finnish companies working in India, which have invested about €4 billion here. The largest of them is Nokia, which employs close to 17,000 people here.

Without hazarding a guess about where the trade and investment relations would head after the FTA and investment agreement with the EU, which Finland is a part of, the ambassador observed that the trend is positive.

“But I also think there is room for growth. But unfortunately, India is not too well known in Finland. And Finland certainly is not too well known in India. So, we need to do work for that,” Lahdevirta, who is on his first official visit to Calcutta, said.

To raise awareness, the World Circular Economy Forum will be held in Delhi next autumn — the first time in continental Asia — in collaboration with the Finnish innovation fund, Sitra.

Finland’s export promotion network in India operates under the framework of ‘DESI’ — digitalisation, education, sustainability and innovation — which has now been expanded with an ‘M’ for mobility, representing the growing exchange between the two countries.

The ambassador said people-to-people contact between the two countries is also growing, with Finland issuing 17,000 visas to India last year.

The number of Indians settled in Finland has also grown tenfold from the turn of this century onwards to 20,000 now.

Talking about the opportunities in the East and especially Bengal, Lahdevirta said there are about nine companies operating in Calcutta. He identified opportunities in areas of renewable energy, agro-based industry in particular.