Modi, Sampur and Indian Security Policies

Close observers heard distant but nevertheless clear ringing of the bells of warning about a pre-arranged Indo-Lanka plan to forge closer… and shared… Indo-Lanka maritime ties judging by the apparently easy acceptance by Indian Premier Narendra Modi of President Sirisena’s proposals to convert Sampur into a Natural Liquefied Gas project.
Back of this proposal which obviously would have been preceded by numerous top level closed door discussions on the issue between Indian and Lankan politicians (read Indo-Pacific Maritime Strategy planner a la Ranil Wickremesinghe’s first mooted proposal on the issue) before it innocuously and almost casually found expression at the Modi-Sirisena talks, we wrote weeks ago that there was very, very much more to the sudden invite from Modi to our President. We now see clearly that this is all converging into a wider mechanism aimed at Lanka’s delicate balancing of ties with India and China.
Primarily, to close observers who know something about this ball game, India, buttressed on all sides of the production, demand and supply sides of the immense natural gas issue, produces 40 billion cubic feet of gas to meet a demand of over 2 Trillion cubic feet a year.
The shortfall is imported!! Let’s look at the other side of the energy picture in the context of the Sampur Coal Power plant. Coal India, the world’s biggest coal miner, is targeting a 20 per cent rise in production and has seen a 12.4 per cent growth year-on-year and this growth will be sustained in the days to come.
India has an ultra-mammoth 300 billion tonnes of coal reserves.
The anticipated producing to match demand is about 1.5 billion tonnes of coal by 2020. Coal India Limited (CIL) has been producing about 494 million tonnes of coal and plans on doubling CIL production to a billion tonnes of coal and 500 million tonnes by non-CIL entities. India plans on ramping up production from the existing level to twice the level in the next few years.
To cut a long story short, Modi has amazingly agreed to look into the feasibility of converting Sampur into LPG of which India has a huge deficit, from COAL, a resource material of which India has an un-estimated massive surfeit. Mind you, India’s fertilizer and energy sectors alone consume more than an aggregate 85 per cent of her LPG production…and yet, apparently Modi is willing to consider opting for the hugely more expensive option of converting Sampur into gas!
In simple terms, Modi, a man with a wide world view of finance/economic affairs, has agreed to …if not entirely committed himself, and India, to…an obviously entirely different ball game in ensuring that India has control of Sampur.
Of course, we all know that initial seismic studies indicate positive signs of gas deposits around Sri Lanka, and certainly oil and gas on the Western seaboard offshore right up to and beyond the Mannar offshore explorations. This region is contiguous with India’s oil and gas rich Cauvery Basin and in fact the entire massive region between the two countries could be one single oil and gas field with enormous economic implication for Sri Lanka’s economic growth.
On the other hand, the huge offshore gas fields of Mumbai where the ocean floor is trellised with nearly 5,000 kilometres of gas pipelines can be a simple remedy to feed the planned change from coal to gas for Sampur with a few hundred more kilometers of pipeline. So, from the lower reaches of Cauvery or Offshore of Mumbai, India has, two ready-made options to easily convert from coal to gas.
Significantly, this will neatly tie in with and in fact become part and parcel of the historically mind-boggling idea discussed by Modi and Sirisena of an Exclusive Indo-Lanka Economic Zone which will , de facto, give India huge access to all of Sri Lanka’s territorial waters stretching in the direction of Madagascar on the West and the Malaccan Straits on the East. All of this will very neatly hedge in China within an area LESS THAN 200 NAUTICAL MILES IN THE SOUTH.
We finally come to storage of the LPG which will need something more than the 9 terminals in Trincomalee, depending on how very much larger than initially planned the Sampur project is allowed to grow.
Looks to me like, if Mahinda Rajapaksa dragged Sri Lanka unthinkingly and foolishly into the China vortex, Maithripala Sirisena is more conscious of the need to sustain access to world markets and an even handed foreign policy.
He has in effect become signatory to the emerging geopolitics of energy in South Asia and the Pacific.
That’s the huge significance of what appeared to be President Sirisena’s casual pilgrimage at Modi’s invite.

694 Viewers