The Hindu : Front Page : India confident of sourcing more crude from Nigeria

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Oct 17, 2007
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India confident of sourcing more crude from Nigeria

Sandeep Dikshit

— Photo: AP

Prime minister Manmohan Singh arrives in Johannesburg on Tuesday ahead of the IBSA Summit.

ABOARD PM’S SPECIAL AIRCRAFT: New Delhi is confident of sourcing a greater proportion of crude from Nigeria — India’s largest trading partner in Africa and the biggest supplier of oil from the region — than from the Middle-East in the near future. This optimism stems from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s just-concluded visit to Nigeria.

Nigeria currently supplies 12 per cent of India’s oil imports and the understanding struck with the Nigerian government will ensure that this rises to 16 per cent in the near future.

“This is a significant development in our quest for energy security. We are also addressing positively the [Nigerian] proposal to set up a major refinery in which the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation will be the leader. We are also going to explore opportunities in upstream and downstream sectors,” Minister of State for External Affairs Anand Sharma said on Tuesday.

To insure the energy relationship against the perils of a mono-dimensional relationship, Dr. Singh attempted to broad-base the ties with Nigeria. At an hour-long meeting with the Nigerian President’s Economic Management Team (EMT), he agreed to set up a joint team with the Indian Planning Commission to help improve the West African country’s planning process, taxation system, human resource development and infrastructure planning.

The Prime Minister suggested that the special group hold its first meeting in the first quarter of next year.

In his interaction with the EMT as well as with the Economic Community of West African States, Dr. Singh laid emphasis on linking human resource and infrastructure development. He underlined that this was one area in which India was contributing to not only Nigeria but also the entire Africa.

PTI reports from Johannesburg:

Later, Dr. Singh arrived in Johannesburg to attend the second India-Brazil-South Africa summit, which will explore ways of intensifying South-South cooperation.

At the summit in Pretoria on Wednesday, he, along with South African and Brazilian Presidents Thabo Mbeki and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, will look at ways of making the relationship among the three countries more “tangible.”

Besides deepening South-South cooperation through concrete projects and programmes in key areas of trilateral cooperation, the meeting is expected to provide an opportunity to the leaders to coordinate joint positions on issues of global importance.

Joint declaration

The meeting is likely to come out with a joint declaration and memoranda of understanding and agreements on public administration, higher education, health and medicine, social development, cultural cooperation and energy.

The Prime Minister, during the two-day stay, will also hold bilateral meetings with leaders of South Africa and Brazil, both members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

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