The Hindu Business Line : BIMSTEC high on energy

ON THE FACE of it, good work is being done on the BIMSTEC front (comprising Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Nepal and Bhutan) if the schedule of events prepared some time back and its phased implementation are any indication. The latest example of this is the Energy Ministers' conference held in New Delhi earlier this week. This was a chosen sector of cooperation among the members of the grouping, which was formally christened the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation at the first summit held in Bangkok in July 2004.

In New Delhi, among other things, the members of the group pledged "to pursue the goal of providing secure, reliable and affordable energy" to their citizens, an objective that is clearly unexceptionable in scope and intention. Also drawn up was a sectoral roadmap covering such areas as `power grid inter-connections', gas pipelines, hydro-electric projects, and non-conventional energy sources. According to the conference declaration, the aim was "to agree to share the available expertise for coal exploration and mining, for hydro power development, for development of hydrocarbons and for developing non- conventional energy resources and to pool our strengths for capacity building in all areas of energy sector." The focal point was the setting up of a BIMSTEC Centre of Energy, which would pool the group's "experience in reforms, restructuring, regulation and best practices in (the) energy sector".

The importance of cooperation on energy issues for the member-countries cannot be over-emphasised. But more important is to pinpoint specific projects of cooperation such as building transmission lines or gas pipelines which would make energy production and consumption in the BIMSTEC region more efficient than it is now. Certainly, there can be no dearth of such projects, but the point is whether it would be in, say, India's overall interest and of its energy economics, in particular, to participate in schemes to evacuate hydro power from Nepal in the north, to Bangladesh, Thailand and Myanmar in the south-east, or to build gas pipelines to Thailand and Sri Lanka. In fact, gas pipeline is where some BIMSTEC projects may face turbulence, as suggested by the sort of problems New Delhi is facing in putting one up from the North-East to West Bengal across Bangladesh territory, not to say anything about the Myanmar-India project which, again, will have to traverse Bangladesh to have any effective utility.

It is in this larger perspective that BIMSTEC and its place in New Delhi's scheme of things vis-à-vis technical and economic cooperation will have to be seen. This apart, while it is axiomatic that cooperation among nations is always to be preferred, care must be taken to ensure that economic and technical partnerships under the aegis of BIMSTEC do not clash with similar initiatives under the SAARC or the ASEAN umbrellas. New Delhi would, therefore, do well to be extra-cautious when it gets down to the nitty-gritty of fleshing out an FTA among the BIMSTEC group. A framework agreement on this was signed by the member-countries in February 2004, and the FTA is to become functional from July 1, 2006.

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