Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline project not shelved: India

India has not abandoned $ 7.3 billion Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project and is seriously looking for courageous insurance companies to underwrite the project, a senior diplomat attached to the Permanent Mission of India to the UN said today.

India has not abandoned $ 7.3 billion Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project and is seriously looking for courageous insurance companies to underwrite the project, a senior diplomat attached to the Permanent Mission of India to the UN said today.

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As the natural gas comes via Pakistan from Iran, there are some serious security concerns. "Apart from what we see is happening in the world today, we need Lloyds or other major global insurance giants setting up a new division and undertake the risk so that we can start the project," he said.

On the global threat of terrorism and how India is planning to take up the issue at the Security Council, the official, who did not wished to be named, said elements such as Taliban or Al-Qaeda are the core issues.

"We know where the wiper or the snake comes from? We have to collectively deal with that. Pakistan is one country that is itself feeling the problems of terrorism now and the bigger problem faced by that country today is terrorism," he said.

On the question of expansion of G-20 to include more developing countries, the senior diplomat, who enunciated the strategic agenda before India as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council from January 2011, said India is vary about small groups that were designed for a particular purpose suddenly gets expand because others want to be in and it does not serve the purpose.

"G-20 was born as a group of finance ministers when the East Asian economic crisis took place in 1997. The world financial and economic crisis took place in 2008 and no one knew how to deal with it including the US, the International Monetary Fund the World Bank had no clue. It was then decided to upgrade the finance ministers group to a heads of state governments so that they could do macro economic coordination and stimulus package and be able to produce reasonably good results. G-20 is big enough as it has the major economies and emerging economies," he said.

"If another crisis takes place, nations have to turn to some countries that are able to deliver the goods. India is yet to take a complete view on this stand," he said.

On the global issues India will be facing as a non-permanent member, he said North Korea is a factor Security Council should concern itself and no member of the Council will disagree on this.

On Myanmar, he said there are two approaches. One is broadly speaking the kind of approach India has taken along with some other very important countries in the region like China.