India and China have identified ten areas for boosting cooperation under a new high level mechanism for cultural and people-to-people exchanges. India’s External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi chaired the first meeting of the mechanism that was proposed at the summit between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping at Wuhan in April this year.

The mechanism will club together more than 40 existing programmes for cooperation in culture and people-to-people exchanges and also include some new schemes, according to reports.

“Today, we identified 10 areas of people-to-people cooperation – cultural exchanges, cooperation in films and television, museum management, sports exchanges, youth exchanges, tourism cooperation, exchanges between states and cities, traditional medicine, yoga, and education,” Swaraj said.

Wang said the number of tourists travelling between India and China was small compared to their combined population of 2.7 billion.

“We both agree that as China-India cooperation embraces a strong momentum of full growth, people-to-people exchanges must also step up and this will be helpful to increase our mutual understanding and friendship,” he said.

India, according to a recent report, is making a pitch for tourists as only 300,000 of over 144 million Chinese tourists who travelled abroad visited India last year whereas over 1.4 million Indians travelled to China.

The two countries are regarded as regional heavyweights and bulwarks of new international economic policy. Military exchanges have also increased between them recently.