Govt mulls panel for strategic Iranian port

Chabahar Port to be operational by 2018

In order to expedite its $550 million investment in redevelopment of Iran’s Chabahar port, the Centre plans to set up an empowered committee of secretaries. The proposed panel will look into issues related to easing of financial terms and other contractual issues, in order to make the project more lucrative for private investors which New Delhi plans to attract for assisting in the mega scale development of the Persian Gulf nation’s major port.

According to highly placed sources, the Centre is learnt to have more or less finalised the terms of references for the proposed empowered committee, which is likely to have top officials of the finance, commerce and shipping ministries in it.

The formation of the panel comes at a time when there are concerns that the expected returns from the development project could be affected due to the United States hardening its stance on Iran over its purported non-compliance of terms of the nuclear treaty which was inked by Tehran in 2015 with world powers like the United States, UK, France, Germany, Russia and China as well as the European Union.

Sources privy to developments said there are apprehensions that with India having pledged such a heavy investment in the project, which had initially been envisaged during former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s tenure in 2003, owing to growing tensions between the US and Iran, if private investment gets affected, then it could result in the project hanging around New Delhi’s neck like an albatross.

Considering these immediate challenges, they added that the empowered committee is likely to fine tune the terms and conditions of the project in such a way as to make it more favourable to potential investors in the project. Apart from the bilateral pact to develop the Chabahar port, for which India will invest $500 million, a trilateral agreement on transport and transit corridor has also been signed by India, Afghanistan and Iran.

The government is hopeful that the strategic Chabahar Port in Iran will be operational by the end of 2018, Union minister Nitin Gadkari had said some time back.