Current Nuclear Suppliers Group Chair Kazakhstan Pushing India’s Membership

NEW DELHI: Kazakhstan as the current chair of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) is assisting India to obtain membership of the coveted group, according to Bulat Sarsenbayev, who recently concluded his five year term as Kazakh Ambassador to India.

Kazakhstan, one of uranium suppliers for Indian nuclear power plants, is also doing its best to enable India attain membership of NSG, according Sarsenbayev who recently returned to Astana to join a senior position in government.

In a freewheeling interview before his departure Sarsenbayev spoke about the current state of the Kazakh-Indian partnership, the main areas of cooperation between the two countries and outlined the areas of promising cooperation.

In particular, he elaborated on issues of trade, economic and investment cooperation, including the field of energy, information and financial technologies, space, cooperation in the military-technical sphere, as well as the integration of the use of transit opportunities of Kazakhstan and India via Iran.

“Currently, Kazakhstan is India’s main trading partner in Central Asia. The trade turnover between our countries reached $ 1.2 billion in 2018 (in 2015, the trade turnover amounted to $ 461.6 million). In the first three months of this year, bilateral trade between Kazakhstan and India amounted to $ 293.1 million, which is 35.9% more than in the same period last year. The bilateral trade this year so far has already touched $ 1.5 billion,” he informed.

Cooperation between Kazakh capital Nur-Sultan (Astana) and Delhi is actively developing, mutual trips of citizens of the two countries are intensified “… if in 2014 Kazakhstan issued about 6 thousand visas to citizens of India, in 2018 it was more than 26,000 visas. Air Astana will soon have 14 flights to Delhi per week,” the Ambassador informed.

The Ambassador also referred to possibilities of joint military production and closer coordination between the National Security Councils of the two sides.

Kazakhstan, with its vast resources and strategic considerations, launched the Astana International Finance Centre in 2018 to be a financial hub for the whole region. An initiative of the First President of Kazakhstan NursultanNazarbayev, the AIFC features a modern stock exchange – AIX – whose shareholders include NASDAQ, Shanghai Stock Exchange, Silk Road Fund and Goldman Sachs. The Centre’s main areas of activity include capital market development, asset management, private wealth management. Sarsenbayev mentioned that India is already in talks with AIFC and Indian financial firms can take advantage of that.

The AIFC established a regulatory regime that follows international standards to ensure fairness, transparency and efficiency of the financial market, protect the interests of investors and customers of financial services, and minimize systemic risk. The International Arbitration Center (IAC) provides an independent, cost-effective and operational alternative to litigation, acting in accordance with the best international standards for resolving civil and commercial disputes in the AIFC, according to Sarsenbayev.

Source: ET

Image Courtesy: The Qazaq Times