Indian Vice President Hamid Anasari will on Friday leave for a three-day visit to Turkmenistan where he will attend the much-delayed TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) gas pipeline ground-breaking ceremony.
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The visit would also highlight the importance that Pakistan attaches to the TAPI Gas Pipeline project and Pakistan’s commitment for its early completion.
Vice President Ansari will later in the day attend the inauguration of the International Conference on “Policy of Neutrality: International Cooperation in the name of Peace, Security and Development”. Pakistan’s insurgency in Balochistan will further add to the project, whose final cost estimation is still to be done.
The feasibility study, proposed to lay a 56-inch diameter 1,680km pipeline with design capacity of 3.2 billion ft³ of natural gas per annum from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan up to Pak-India border.
In Ashgabat, the vice president will also pay his respects before a bust of Mahatma Gandhi that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had unveiled during his visit to the Central Asian nation in July this year. Thus this project will help in mitigating energy deficit in the country.
The proposed route of the pipeline passes from Herat in South West Afghanistan, through risky minefields and Taliban-controlled districts to Kandahar before entering Balochistan where terrorist attacks remain a risk.
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Nawaz Sharif will also hold a bilateral meeting with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkmengaz is now the consortium leader of the project, with reports that UAE company Dragon Oil may take over some part of it. Pakistan’s energy needs in future will not only be accomplished by TAPI, but Iran-Pakistan (IP) gas pipeline as well as construction of more Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) terminals in Karachi and Gwadar which are also under consideration.
