Acting Transport Minister Jeffrey Siow met with 3 counterparts in India; says SG is small & needs only 1 AURORATOTO GROUP

SINGAPORE: Acting Transport Minister Jeffrey Siow accompanied Prime Minister Lawrence Wong on a visit to New Delhi, India, from Sep 2 to 4, 2025.

PM Wong’s visit to the country marks the 60th year of diplomatic relations between the two nations and saw the signing of five significant memoranda of understanding (MOUs).

Accompanying the Prime Minister were Minister for Foreign Affairs Vivian Balakrishnan, Acting Minister for Transport and Senior Minister of State for Finance Jeffrey Siow, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and for Trade and Industry Gan Siow Huang, as well as a number of officials from the Prime Minister’s Office, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Ministry of Transport, and Ministry of Digital Development and Information.

In a Facebook post late last week, Mr Siow noted that he had a fruitful trip to New Delhi and had met three of his counterparts: Minister of Civil Aviation Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu, Minister of Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari, and Minister of Ports, Shipping and Waterways Sarbananda Sonowal.

“I told them that Singapore is a small country, so one transport minister is responsible for air, land, and sea,” he wrote, along with a smiling face emoji.

He added that it had been a joy to get together with Singaporeans in New Delhi at a reception celebrating the city-state’s 60th birthday.

Read related: Why doesn’t Singapore have a full Transport Minister yet?

Last week was a busy one for the Acting Transport Minister, who was appointed to the post shortly after being elected as a member of Parliament for the Chua Chu Kang Group Representation Constituency in the May 3 polls. Mr Siow took over from Chee Hong Tat, who is now the Minister for National Development, and who, in turn, had assumed the post after his predecessor, S Iswaran, had been asked to go on leave by then-Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong while under investigation by the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau.

On September 1 and 2, Mr Siow needed to contend with service interruptions on the Circle Line and the North-South Line, and while these disruptions lasted less than an hour each, many in Singapore have voiced growing disappointment with what they perceive as increasingly frequent train breakdowns.

The Acting Minister, along with Senior Minister of State Sun Xueling and others from the Ministry of Transport and the Land Transport Authority, met with representatives from the National Taxi Association, the National Private Hire Vehicles Association, and the Singapore-JB Taxi Association to discuss the regularisation of cross-border point-to-point transport in light of the needs of Singaporean commuters, opportunities for local drivers and the issue of illegal vehicles providing these services. /TISG

Read also: All eyes on MOUs to be signed during PM Wong’s upcoming India visit