Thursday, March 31, 2016

India to accede to the Ashgabat Agreement

Ashgabat City, Turkmenistan
There is an old Chinese story. A Chinese princess was sent to marry a king. As the kingdom was far away, she and her party took considerable time to travel that distance. By the time they arrived, the person whom she was supposed to marry died and his son became the new King. Princess finally married the new king and happily lived thereafter.
In old days concerns about long distance travel was not only about the enormous time it took but also the heavy risk associated with that and expenditure. However now, because of advances in technology, supply chain management and logistics long distance transportation of goods became cheaper and simpler. Still it a big concern for companies when source/ destination is far from sea and goods has to pass through multiple international land borders. We all saw how much US had to struggle to supply materials to their troops deployed in landlocked Afghanistan. It took considerable cost to transport goods from Karachi port to Afghanistan due to continuous terrorist strikes on the way. Finally, they opened NDN (Northern Distribution Network) as an alternate (safe but costlier one).
It is in scenario we need to understand the importance of intergovernmental agreements for a common framework mechanism. One such mechanism is Ashgabat Agreement.
This agreement is "an international transport and transit corridor facilitating transportation of goods between Central Asia and the Persian Gulf….has Oman, Iran, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan as founding members. Kazakhstan has also joined this arrangement subsequently. Accession to the Agreement would enable India to utilise this existing transport and transit corridor to facilitate trade and commercial interaction with the Eurasian region"
Recently Union Cabinet of India decided to accede to Ashgabat. Once the founding members gave the consent Indian will become a party to this agreement.
Hope that after became a party to this one India will be better connected with Central Asian, Euresian regions.

Sajeev

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