New Delhi, June 3: Mexico will seek India's shoestring-budget space technology to launch its own satellites when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits the country next week on a trip that could kick-start New Delhi's most sustained engagement with the key Latin American country in recent years.

Modi will spend only a few hours in Mexico City, locked in talks with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto next Wednesday before joining his host in a special dinner for the Indian Prime Minister, and then returning to New Delhi.

But the visit to Mexico, the world's 15th largest economy and the largest source of investment from Latin America in India, comes 30 years after Rajiv Gandhi made the last standalone bilateral visit by an Indian Prime Minister to the country.

The two countries have come closer - from bilateral trade to reforms of multilateral institutions like the UN - in this period. But the absence of a bilateral visit by an Indian Prime Minister to Mexico in this period stands out since Indian Prime Ministers have made such trips to every other G-20 country since Rajiv's 1986 trip to Mexico City.

"We've been courting each other for more than 60 years," Mexico's ambassador to India, Melba Pria, told The Telegraph in an interview at the country's embassy here. "It's time we went a step beyond that, and married our interests."

India's membership bid to the nuclear suppliers group, a key export control group, increasing trade and investment, and diversifying an economic relationship heavily dependent on oil purchases from Mexico will form key themes of Modi's talks with Peña Nieto, officials said.

But India's space programme appears set to provide the unlikely diplomatic fillip that could send the relationship into orbit. In 2014, the Indian Space Research Organisation successfully put a spacecraft in the orbit around Mars with a budget less than what was spent on the Hollywood film Gravity.

"We think we can benefit from India's space programme, in launching our own satellites - whether for communication or weather monitoring," Pria said.

For Mexico, Modi's visit to the country next week is quite not the consummation of their relationship.

This will be a brief "working visit," and Mexico is expecting the Indian Prime Minister to pay a full-fledged official visit next year. In between, foreign minister Sushma Swaraj has promised to visit Mexico in September for a meeting of the bilateral joint commission that sets the template for the relationship by identifying areas for potential cooperation.

But next week's visit is critical because it comes at a time both countries are trying to drive up their trade and two-way investments. Bilateral trade currently stands at $6.4 billion (Rs 43,000 crore) annually.

"There is a real growth in trade, but there is a sense that there's much more we can do with Mexico," foreign secretary S. Jaishankar said today.

Both countries also want to diversify trade and investment.

India is Mexico's largest buyer of crude in Asia, and oil constitutes two-thirds of the trade relationship at present. But other sectors, including manufacturing in Mexico - the world's largest producer of many electronic goods, including LED televisions - and India's information technology represent opportunities ripe for exploitation, Pria suggested. Within the energy sector too, Mexico is keen to broaden its partnership with India - beyond just oil, to cover clean energy.

"What we are looking at is a strategic energy partnership," Pria said. "A partnership that looks at both traditional energy forms and clean energy, including solar, where there is great interest on both sides."