New Delhi - India and Pakistan were committed to securing their energy sources by building a $7.4 billion (R44.5 billion) gas pipeline from Iran, officials said on Friday.
Pakistan and India needed the pipeline to fulfil their fuel needs, said Pakistan's oil minister, Amanullah Jadoon.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India said his country's vote against Iran's nuclear programme at a February 4 meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency would not obstruct the pipeline project.
The vote did not diminish the nation's ties with Iran, Singh told parliament. "We are committed to the proposed ... pipeline."
The US wants India to shun the pipeline project to isolate Iran, which, it says, is trying to build nuclear weapons.
The Middle East nation denies the accusation and says its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes.
The US government had told India an agreement giving the country access to American nuclear technology might fall through unless the country supported the US stance on Iran's atomic programme, the BBC cited US ambassador to India, David Mulford, as saying last month.
India and Pakistan are seeking to build the 2 100km pipeline to transport natural gas from Iran to meet their growing energy requirements.
"We're serious about the project because we need gas," Jadoon said. "India also needs gas."
India and Pakistan agreed to start building the pipeline in 2007 at their last meeting in New Delhi on December 17.
The countries expected to complete the pipeline by 2010, when Pakistan would have a shortage of the fuel, Ahmad Waqar, Pakistan's oil secretary, said at the time.
During the December meeting, the nations agreed that the pipeline would transport 90 million cubic metres of gas a day for the first two to three years and later carry 150 million cubic metres a day.
Pakistan's share of the gas will be 30 million cubic metres a day initially and 60 million in about three years.
Ministers from India, Pakistan and Iran would hold their first meeting on the project in Tehran in March, India and Iran said on December 29.
The project, conceived a decade ago, was delayed by strained relations between India and Pakistan. Improving ties since 2003 prompted the countries to start talks on the proposed pipeline.
India's current gas supplies of 85 million cubic metres a day, including imported liquefied natural gas, fell short of potential demand of 170 million cubic metres, former oil minister Mani Shankar Aiyar said in June. Gas demand might rise to 400 million cubic metres a day by 2025 if the economy grew at the projected rate of between 7 percent and 8 percent a year, Aiyar said.
Pakistan expects a shortage of 30 million cubic metres from 2010.
Meanwhile, India has started culling poultry in the western part of the country after the first cases of bird flu in chickens emerged at the weekend, adding the south Asian country to those affected in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
A total of 900 000 chickens would be culled in Nandurbar district, the only place in the state of Maharashtra where the virus had been detected, the province's chief minister, Vilasrao Deshmukh, said yesterday. As many as 49 poultry farms had been sealed and the culling would be completed by this morning.
"We are fully concentrating on this area," Deshmukh said. "The disease will be contained."
New outbreaks in birds are being reported daily across Europe, the Middle East and Asia, creating more opportunity for human infection and increasing the risk of the virus changing into a pandemic.
The risk of the disease moving from poultry to humans would make vulnerable the 1.1 billion people of India. India said it was taking all possible precautions to check the spread.
Culling started yesterday morning, said Vijay Satbir Singh, Maharashtra's health secretary. The government would pay farmers 10 rupees (R1.40) for each chick, 30 rupees for a broiler and 40 rupees for a chicken, Singh said.
Deshmukh said no humans had been affected by the disease.
Still, Singh said the government had 9 000 capsules of Roche Holding's influenza drug, Tamiflu, and might buy 5 000 more.
The Press Trust of India reported yesterday that a 27-year-old poultry farmer from Nandurbar district was suspected to have died of bird flu at a hospital in Surat, in neighbouring Gujarat state.
Vatsala Vasudeva, the highest administrative official of Surat district, said the person was not a poultry farm owner. Authorities were waiting for test reports to see whether bird flu was the cause of death.
The Maharashtra state administration had created 60 teams to cull fowl in 19 villages, said Pradeep Deshpande, the superintendent of police in Nandurbar.
The state government had created special wards in hospitals around the affected region to treat people who might be infected, Deshpande said. No case had been referred to the hospitals.
Nearly 200 million domestic poultry had died or been culled in Asia since the first reports of the H5N1 virus outbreaks at the end of 2003, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation said on Friday. The economic loss to affected Asian countries is estimated at $10 billion.
India's poultry population was 489 million in 2003, according to the livestock census released in January last year. Nandurbar district had 3.1 million poultry.
The Indian government said on Saturday that it was taking all precautions, including putting the affected area under quarantine and keeping people who had been in contact with the birds under observation. People in affected areas are being advised to avoid eating chicken and maintain "proper hygiene and sanitation".