New Delhi: India and the UK agreed to form a Chief Executives Forum, a group six business leaders, to promote trade between the two countries.

The Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, and his British counterpart, Mr David Cameron, announced the decision on Thursday. The Chief Executives Forum would be led by Standard Chartered Plc's CEO, Mr Peter Sands, and the Chairman of the Tata Group, Mr Ratan Tata. The group will include three Indian business leaders and three Britons. The four remaining spots in the forum are yet to be filled.

The forum will listen to businesses' concerns and ideas for improving trade and investment between the countries.

Meanwhile, six more UK firms on Thursday announced multi-million pound deals in India. The British Business Secretary, Mr Vince Cable, said, “I warmly welcome today's announcements. India is a country where you don't have to be a multinational to succeed. We have superb UK companies operating here in partnership with Indian firms, and I would encourage more UK firms to explore the opportunities here.”

Among the deals announced on Thursday is a £34-million (Rs 247.33 crore approximately) contract won by Griffon Hoverwork to sell hovercraft to the Indian coastguard. The London-based architecture firm Benoy has also won three projects in Bangalore and Mumbai worth over £1.6 million (Rs 11.64 crore approximately).

Other agreements include picoChip which has signed a multi-million pound deal with Rancore Technologies. Rancore has selected picoChip's wireless baseband technology for the development of 4G base stations for rollout in India's next generation networks. Rancore will use picoChip's picoArray PC203 multi-core digital signal processor, and picoChip physical layer (PHY) software, to develop next-generation base stations.

The London-based business processing firm Xchanging has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Karnataka Government to build a 2,000-seat processing centre in a new Special Economic Zone. Xchanging is the first multinational company to set up a centre in a Tier-3 location in India. Also on Thursday, construction equipment company JCB announced the production of their 100,000th vehicle in India.