Express News Service By

NEW DELHI:India and Kazakhstan have signed a bigger contract for supply of uranium for the next four years for fuel-hungry Indian nuclear power plants, even as both countries look to widen cooperation in defence and improve connectivity routes, both for goods and energy.

After talks held in the palatial presidential palace between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Nursultan Nazarbayev, five agreements were signed, which include a long-term contract for supply of Uranium and defence cooperation.

This is the second leg of Modi’s six-nation tour, in which he is spending barely 24 hours in the five central Asian countries. In his statement, Modi noted that Kazakhstan was one of the first countries with which India signed a civil nuclear cooperation. “We are pleased to have a much larger second contract now,” he said.

The long term contract signed between the Department of Atomic Energy and KazAtomProm is for sale and purchase of 5,000 tonnes of Uranium to India from 2015 to 2019. The contract with Kazakhstan, which has world’s second largest reserves, had ended in December last year. It has supplied about 1,400 tonnes since 2010-11.

With the hydrocarbons being a “high priority”, Modi and Nazarbayev jointly launched the drilling operations for exploration in the first oil field with Indian investments in Kazakhstan. Both sides have agreed to hold a joint feasibility study to explore the transport of hydrocarbons through a pipeline or as LNG from Kazakhstan to India.

New Delhi had suggested the pipeline route to Kazakhstan in 2013, which if came to fruition would be longer than the Trans-Afghanistan (TAPI) pipeline.