Over the next few weeks, half-a-dozen high functionaries of the Indian Government are going to be in the United States in a clutch of visits reminiscent of the flurry of exchanges in 1995.

First off the block will be Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, who has just embarked on a much-awaited and much-hyped fortnight-long trip to the US.

He will be followed by Power Minister P Rangarajan Kumaramangalam and Minister of State for Coal Dilip Ray, who are both going to Houston for an energy conference mid-September.

Industries Minister Sikandar Bakht, Information and Broadcasting Minister Sushma Swaraj and Environment Minister Suresh Prabhu will also head out to US over the next month, as will Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Gopinath Munde.

Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha will be inWashington in the first week of October for the annual World Bank-IMF meetings.

And of course there are the usual delegation of Parliamentarians. An Ethics Committee headed by former Home Minister S B Chavan (he of the CIA-bashing fame), which was supposed to go to the US towards the end of the month (to study ethics), has been asked to hold its horses because of a scheduling problem.

The United States Information Agency (USIA) is taking another delegation of freshmen Parliamentarians. Then of course there is the Foreign Minister (for US Affairs) and Ambassador-at-large (for United States) Jaswant Singh, who is fast becoming a familiar figure in the corridors of power and academia in the US.

Having just returned home after spending nearly 10 days pow-wowing with the Americans in Washington and New York, Singh returns again to the US capital on October 20, ahead of Prime Minister Vajpayee's trip to New York for the UN General Assembly session beginning October 22. This will be Singh's third trip to theUS in three months and clearly, he loves the US as much as the US loves him.

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee himself is expected at the UN on October 22, his first visit as Prime Minister to a venue he is very familiar with as leader of many a parliamentary delegation. Vajpayee is expected to meet Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on October 23. Whether he meets President Clinton depends on a lot of things, including, most of all, whether President Clinton will be there.

But the most anticipated trip of the lot is the visit of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, the current darling of the Indian corporati.

Naidu will be whizzing around US for a fortnight, the high point being his meeting with Microsoft's Bill Gates in Redmond on October 15. Of course, most digerati in the US know that the hoopla about his being a cyberwhiz is just that -- all it needs is a visit to www.andhrapradesh.com, a pathetic website of the country's most hyped Government.

Still, after being consignedto the doghouse after the nuclear tests in May, the business community -- both Indian and American -- is looking to Naidu to galvanise the atmosphere and bring some comfort to the sanctions-stricken constituency.

Not to be missed: Naidu is going to meet Assistant Secretary of State Rick Inderfurth in Washington.

The last time anyone turned to look at an Indian Chief Minister here was when West Bengal's Jyoti Basu visited in 1995 -- mostly because they were curious to see how a Communist relic had become an ersatz capitalist.