Joe Biden Begins India Trip

Officials are not expecting many "deliverables"

NEW DELHI — Vice President Joe Biden arrived in India on Monday afternoon for a four-day visit designed to strengthen ties and lay the groundwork for a summit between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Obama this fall in Washington.

Biden, making his first visit to India as vice president and the first by any sitting U.S. vice president in decades, began his trip by visiting a memorial to Mohandas K. Gandhi, the leader whose nonviolent movement freed India from British rule.

"What a high honor and great privilege to be here in this sacred spot — memorializing one man who changed the world," he wrote in the visitors book at Gandhi Smriti, where Gandhi was killed in 1948.