Kate to accompany Prince William on India visit for Earthshot Prize awards

MUMBAI/LONDON: Britain’s Princess of Wales Kate will undertake her biggest foreign trip since having treatment for cancer when she joins her husband Prince William in India for his annual Earthshot Prize awards this week.

Heir-to-the-throne William, 44, and Kate are flying out for a series of events across Mumbai during a three-day visit that includes Tuesday’s awards ceremony.

For Kate, 44, the trip marks her most high-profile overseas visit since she had preventative chemotherapy for an unspecified form of ​cancer in 2024. While she is now in remission, she says the illness still impacts her life.

William, who, like his father King Charles, has made campaigning on the environment one of his biggest causes, founded the Earthshot Prize in 2020 with the aim of finding solutions to climate change. It awards five winners £1 million ($1.3 million) each to scale up their projects.

“For the prince, Earthshot is ultimately about replacing pessimism with possibility,” a spokesperson for the couple’s office at Kensington Palace said.

“It is about demonstrating that while the environmental challenges facing our planet are serious, the ingenuity, determination and creativity being applied to solving them are every bit as powerful.”

Cricket, fashion and cinema

At the awards ceremony, the royals will be joined by a number of celebrities including Indian cricketing great Sachin Tendulkar, actors Alia Bhatt and Rami Malek, and British pop group Take That, who will give their first-ever performance in India.

“To be performing here for the very first time, after all these years, and alongside the extraordinary people creating a better future for our planet – is really special,” the group said in a statement.

Away from Earthshot, the royals will also meet Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday. A spokesperson for Kensington Palace said that the meeting reflected the importance of the countries’ bilateral relationship in areas such as defence and tech as William develops his role on the world stage.

William and Kate will also attend events linked to Indian cricket, fashion and cinema.

Since her illness, Kate ‌has ⁠significantly reduced her official workload, saying she was taking each day as it comes. While her public appearances have gradually increased, she has not joined William on previous foreign trips.

Her only significant overseas visit since 2024 came in May when she travelled alone to Italy for two days as part of her work focusing on early childhood development.

“I was told in hospital that my recovery would not be linear. There will be good days and bad days, that it will take time,” she said in an interview published this week in Country Life magazine, for which William was guest editor.