Modi, Putin initiative to bring hydrocarbon

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet here next week and announce launch of a joint study to assess feasibility of laying a pipeline to bring hydrocarbon from Russia to India.

Putin is arriving in New Delhi on December 10 and will hold the annual bilateral summit with Modi the next day.

This is going to be the first formal meeting between the two leaders, although they earlier met informally on the sidelines of the BRICS summit at Fortaleza in Brazil in July and the G-20 summit at Brisbane in Australia in November.

Ajay Bisaria, Joint Secretary (Eurasia) in the Ministry of External Affairs, said that Modi’s meeting with Putin would culminate in signing of several deals for cooperation in the fields of defence, customs, banking and hydrocarbon and nuclear energy.

“We are making strenuous efforts to create conducive conditions for strengthening our economic linkages through trade and investment. We are keenly interested in participating in more hydrocarbon projects in Russia,” Bisaria told journalists on Friday.

Sources said that Modi and Putin would announce launch of a joint study to examine feasibility of laying a pipeline to bring in hydrocarbon from Russia to India.

The proposed pipeline would probably run along the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline, added sources. Putin and Modi will also jointly issue a document outlining their vision for bilateral relations for the next 10 years.