Reuters Posted online: Thursday, September 29, 2005 at 1430 hours IST
Beijing, September 29: India should abandon futile attempts to team up with Beijing in the global hunt for energy resources and instead woo Taiwan's management expertise and financial capital, an Indian academic said on Thursday.
In recent months Delhi's Petroleum Minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar, has been a strong advocate of cooperation to reduce competition between the world's two most populous nations.
But the strategy has met an apparently lukewarm reception in Chinese government and business circles, and produced no results wherever the two have faced off in bidding for energy resources. "The oil minister has been desperately looking at alliances with Chinese companies, (but) unfortunately for him the Chinese companies have not bitten," Madhav Nalapat, professor of geopolitics at Manipal Academy of Higher Education told journalists in Beijing.
"We have not won a single oil deal. We have not got one square inch of oil-bearing territory anywhere in the world." Many of those bids have been lost to Chinese firms, he added, including China National Petroleum Corp.'s (CNPC's) recent $4 billion deal for producer PetroKazakhstan Inc.
Advocates of cooperation say it could stop producers pushing up prices by playing off the two import-dependent rivals, who are eagerly hunting oil and gas to fuel their rapid growth.
But Nalapat, who has also been involved in informal Indian diplomacy, said China's deep pockets and political might meant it had limited interest in co-operating with its neighbour, while Taiwan and India could offer each other unique benefits.
"A combination of Taiwanese capital and management with Indian geopolitical skills and diplomatic clout could serve ... in such a way that we can become a world-beater in the field of energy," he said.
Talks between firms were already underway and a deal might even be reached before the end of the year, he added.
Although Beijing is strongly opposed to any country establishing diplomatic relations with democratically ruled Taiwan, which it views as a renegade province, Nalapat said he did not expect it would object to commercial collaboration -- even in such a strategic area.
Chinese firms also appear able to be more ambitious than their Indian counterparts, as highlighted by state-controlled oil firm CNOOC Ltd.'s daring $18.5 billion bid for US producer Unocal Corp earlier this year.
"China subsidises its overseas deals while India won't, and we can't afford it. India wants to reflect the market value of that deal," Ligia Noronha, from New Delhi-based independent Energy and Resources Institute told a seminar in Singapore.
