Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Shri Mani Shankar Aiyar at the meeting of Indo-Kazakhstan Joint Commission on Economic, Scientific, Industrial and Cultural Cooperation being held at Astana, Kazakhstan stated that much more needs to be done, in regard to jointly conducting seismic surveys of hitherto unexplored properties; joint exploration and production; improved and enhanced oil recovery in older fields; and building domestic and cross-border pipelines. He also emphasized at the downstream opportunities for joint ventures in gas processing; petrochemicals and other oil- or gas-based industries; and city gas distribution. He also offered to support Kazakhstan in the fields of satellite technology, digital cartography and photogrammetry, geo-information systems and cadastre.
He said that the North South Corridor and the Akhtau port can be seen as an “energy corridor”, consisting of oil and gas pipelines that link up with the pipelines in South Asia and bring energy resources to India and then move on to South-East Asia. Secondly, this corridoris is seen, both in energy and transport terms, as binding Asia with Europe in a substantial, mutually beneficial connection through Aktau, moving energy resources and commercial products across South-East Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, and thence to North Asia and Northern and Western Europe. Therefore according to him, India could be an active partner in this ambitious endeavour.
The other important area for bilateral cooperation is that of information technology. The Software Technology Park of India (STPI), a society under the Indian Department of Information Technology, has played an important part in India’s global success in the Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) sector, and is in a position to provide technological assistance and infrastructural support to Kazakhstan’s Technology Park project. There are other exciting new possibilities available in this broad sector of computer software and telecommunications to utilise Satellite Remote Sensing and GIS data for agriculture monitoring, command area management, forest monitoring, snow mapping, land degradation studies, and resource development planning for land and water.
