Iran gas pipeline to go ahead: India
Iran gas pipeline to go ahead: India
Agence France-Presse, New Delhi
India will not be deterred by U.S. opposition to a multi-billion dollar gas pipeline from Iran through Pakistan as it is imperative to meet the country's energy growing needs, the foreign minister said in a report on Saturday.
"Our energy needs are going to increase exponentially in the next 20 years and there's no other way but to have this kind of an arrangement," Foreign Minister Natwar Singh said in an interview with The Hindu newspaper.
Negotiations to build the US$4.5 billion gas pipeline from Iran to India via Pakistan began in 1994 but little headway was made because of tensions between Pakistan and India, which have fought three wars since gaining independence in 1947 from Britain.
But against a backdrop of easing tensions between the nuclear- armed neighbors, Indian Oil Minister Mani Shankar Aiyer said in February he had won cabinet approval for resuming talks on the 2,600-kilometer overland pipeline.
Aiyer also said he would visit Islamabad this month to discuss the logistics of the pipeline linking Iran's South Pars gas field to India via southwest Pakistan.
"Our petroleum minister is going to Pakistan very soon. The earlier impression was that India was the stumbling block. We are not," Singh said.
The minister said New Delhi would proceed with the project despite Washington's reservations made known by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a visit here in March.
Rice offered talks on energy cooperation with India, which a state department official later said would encompass civilian nuclear power as well.
"It's a recognition that they (India) have enormous energy needs. Their economy is going fast, they have a huge population," the U.S. official added.
In the interview with The Hindu, the Indian foreign minister also said a peace dialogue with Pakistan on their long-running dispute over the Himalayan region of Kashmir was showing progress.
"The composite dialogue is going extremely well," he said referring to official talks that resumed early last year.
"There is some terrorist activity going on," Singh said referring to an Islamic insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir that New Delhi says is actively encouraged by Islamabad, a charge Pakistan denies.
"But the overall India-Pakistan scene looks more promising than it has done for many decades," he said.
Singh also praised Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, saying that without his "personal involvement," many confidence- building measures, including the resumption of a bus link between the two zones of Kashmir after a gap of almost 60 years, would not have been possible.