Islamabad has extended an olive branch to get New Delhi back into the negotiations on the proposed Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline. It has offered to charge India a transport fee based on global practice rather than the arbitrary tariff it sought last February.

“Pakistan is committed to provide transit facilities to India for the gas from Iran... We are keen to restart consultations with India to arrive at a mutually acceptable tariff compatible with international norms,” says a letter from Ahsanullah Khan, Pakistan’s Minister for Petroleum & Natural Resources, to his Indian counterpart Murli Deora.

Khan has invited Deora for bilateral talks in Pakistan ahead of the trilateral meeting between the three countries “to discuss the way forward” on February 12-13. “I would like to invite you to visit Pakistan on February 7-8 before our meeting in Tehran so that we could move ahead on our bilateral transit arrangements,” he wrote.

To demonstrate Pakistan’s keenness to carry India in the multi-billion dollar project, Khan assured that the “design and infrastructure of the pipeline being prepared by us caters for the quantities of gas for India”.

At an unscheduled meeting on January 26 in London, both ministers had expressed their keenness to put the pipeline project on stream as negotiations between the three countries have been stalled because of differences between Islamabad and New Delhi over transport and transit fee to be charged from India.

The trilateral has to be preceded by the bilateral meeting, but three fixtures were deferred due to the political conditions in Pakistan.

... contd.