Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gestures during a meeting at the Presidential Secretariat in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in this file photo.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Sunday he was looking forward to visiting Britain next month, his first trip as premier after London lifted a decade-long boycott against the leader.

“I will embark on a visit to Britain a day after Diwali,” Modi said, referring to the major Hindu festival to be celebrated on Nov. 11.

“I am looking forward to my visit,” he added, in his monthly radio address. Modi will be in London from Nov. 12 to 14 before heading to Turkey for a G20 summit, an Indian foreign ministry source confirmed to AFP on condition of anonymity.

During the three-day trip, Modi will meet with Britain’s leadership and address the country’s large Indian diaspora at Wembley Stadium, as well as inaugurate a memorial of India’s low-caste icon Bhimrao Ambedkar at his former London house.

The trip is Modi’s first since London ended its decade-long diplomatic boycott of the Hindu nationalist in 2012 over deadly anti-Muslim riots while he was running his home state of Gujarat.

Prime Minister David Cameron invited the premier to visit Britain shortly after Modi’s landslide general election victory in May 2014, in a bid to boost trade and diplomatic ties with India.

India’s gold monetization scheme may be ready in weeks: Modi

A program to attract gold owned by households into a bank deposit scheme to monetise the precious metal could be ready in weeks, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Sunday, a step aimed at cutting expensive imports.

The scheme would allow people to put their gold into banks in return for interest payments in an attempt to mobilize thousands of tons of the metal sitting idle in Indian households. Indians prize gold as gifts and as a way of storing wealth.

The country consumes nearly 1,000 tons of gold every year, most of it imported, and gold is the second-biggest expense on the import bill after oil.

In his monthly radio address, Modi said the programme should be ready before Dhanteras next month, a festival when it is considered an auspicious period to buy gold.

“Please, don’t let your gold be dead money,” Modi said. “Gold is very important for the country. Gold can become an economic strength for us.” Huge gold imports were blamed for pushing the country’s current account deficit to a record $190 billion in 2013, prompting the government to hike its duty on imports to 10 percent, an all-time high.

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