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Nepal, India to hold energy talks
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SME Times News Bureau | 03 Sep, 2014
Officials from Nepal and India will be meeting in New Delhi Wednesday
and Thursday to hold talks on the much-touted Power Trade Agreement
(PTA) between the energy-starved nations.
According to the
decision taken during the visit of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi
to Nepal in August, the two sides agreed to complete the negotiations
within 45 days.
Nepal's cabinet Tuesday formed a seven-member
task force comprising senior officials from the ministries of energy,
finance, foreign affairs and law and justice to negotiate with the
Indian side, Nepal's Minister for Information and Communication,
Minendra Rijal, told the media after a meeting.
Energy Secretary Rajendra Kishor Chettri would be leading the Nepali delegation to India to finalise the PTA, Rijal said.
The
team will hold negotiations with the Indian side in order to sign the
PTA and an attorney has been entrusted to him to include the Indian
position in the PTA before signing it, the minister said.
The PTA
is the key for both the sides to export and import electricity, fixing
the price and exploring the market as energy-starved Nepal and India
need to do business in the long term facilitating power generation and
production.
India and Nepal have been trying to enter into a power trade deal since long so that.
The
Indian side had sent a draft of a Power Cooperation Agreement (PCA) to
Nepal on May 9. The PCA proposed by the Indian side was about power
generation, production and trade and offered full Indian cooperation in
generation and production of hydro-electricity in Nepal.
Before
the visit of Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to Nepal in
July, the Indian draft was leaked in Nepali media and some political
sections in Kathamndu created a huge uproar over the Indian proposal.
Then,
three major political parties of Nepal -- the Nepali Congress, the
Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist), and the United
Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) -- formed a cross-party panel to look
into the PCA proposed by India.
The panel agreed not to mention
anything on power development and generation in the draft and segregated
the trade part for energy generation and production from the PCA draft
and renamed it as PTA.
The Nepali PTA proposes that power tariff
would be determined by the market while third parties would not be
barred from a power deal in Nepal and India.
The panel had
suggested inducting a line -- "to promote the power sector, the two
sides will promote joint ventures on agreed terms in accordance with the
local law".
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