NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will head to the UAE this week, New Delhi’s foreign ministry said, in the first visit by an Indian premier in more than three decades.

Modi will visit from August 16 to 17 and plans to meet his UAE counterpart Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum as well as Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, a foreign ministry statement said.

His visit comes more than 34 years after then prime minister Indira Gandhi visited the UAE in May 1981.

Modi is expected to kick off his two-day visit on Sunday in Abu Dhabi and will deliver an address to the large Indian diaspora at Dubai’s Cricket Stadium Grounds the following day.

The UAE is home to an Indian expatriate community of more than 2.6 million, many of them laborers who have been behind the region’s construction boom.