PLANS REVIVED FOR PURCHASE OF AIRCRAFT FOR NAC

PLANS REVIVED FOR PURCHASE OF AIRCRAFT FOR NAC
Kathmandu, 18 Jan. The Ministry of Tourism and Civil Aviation (MoTCA) has revived plans to purchase two aircraft from Airbus Company for Nepal Airlines Corporation (NAC) after the company proposed a deal with the financial conditions set three years ago, Sangam Parsain reports in The Kathmandu Post.
The plan was revealed by Tourism Minister Lokendra Bista Magar on Wednesday in a meeting of the parliamentary International Relations and Human Rights Committee. The panel had summoned Magar to talk about the current happenings in the country's tourism and aviation sector.
Magar told the committee that Airbus was positive to strike the deal with the same financial conditions set earlier. According to the MoTCA, the French Embassy in Nepal had dispatched a letter to the ministry and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on December 29 last year regarding the issue.
On October 26, 2009, the NAC board had decided to purchase two aircraft from Airbus--Airbus A320-200 (narrow body) and A330-200 (wide body)--to expand its international fleet.
In its proposal, Airbus had quoted US$ 41.28 million for the narrow body aircraft and US$ 92.84 million for the wide body aircraft.
However, with controversy surrounding the purchase process, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on December 28, 2009 directed the government to cancel the deal while the Ministry of Finance directed MoTCA to scrap the purchase process on May 25, 2010.
A highly-placed source said Magar had written to the PAC seeking discussion on the issue to possibly ease the purchase deal. The International Relations and Human Rights Committee also directed MoTCA to go ahead with the deal on Wednesday.
"If the process to purchase the aircraft begins now, the NAC could get two aircraft within five months," said MoTCA Secretary Ganesh Raj Joshi. Deputy general manager of NAC Ganesh Thakur, who was involved in the purchase process earlier, asked lawmakers to support the NAC in this regard.
"We are reviving the earlier deal and are optimistic that the government will support us," he told the lawmakers in Wednesday's meeting.
Although, Magar did not disclose the MoTCA plans after it received the letter from Airbus, he expressed confidence that things, that had not worked with 21 ministers who headed MoTCA before him, will move ahead this time around. "I don't want to be unsuccessful during my term," he said.
According to Magar, since the NAC is currently in the process of acquiring aircraft for the domestic sector, plans to buy aircraft for the international sector will move ahead after the domestic sector process ends.
"All the purchase process will be transparent, direct, legal and responsible," Magar added.
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INDIA, CHINA ATTEMPT TO AVOID FLARE-UP
Kathmandu, 18 Jan.: India and China have agreed to try to avoid flare-ups along their disputed 4,000-km border through the Himalayas, a positive development in often fractious relations between Asia’s emerging giants, Reuters reports from New Delhi.

The two countries, which fought a brief but bloody border war in 1962, have increased their military presence on each side of the border in recent years as their fast-growing economies permit more spending on defence of remote regions.

Under an agreement signed yesterday, high-level diplomats and military officials will aim at ‘timely communication’ about border incidents and meet once or twice a year. “Its main task is to deal with affairs concerning maintaining the peace and tranquility of the border area,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said at a briefing today.

However, the two countries are still a long way from agreeing on their territory — China says most of India’s Arunachal Pradesh state is part of Tibet. For its part, India claims China’s isolated Aksai Chin plateau near Kashmir as its own.

“Both sides reiterated that before the border issue is resolved, they will together strive to preserve the peace and tranquility of the border,” Liu said.

Shyam Saran, a former foreign secretary for India, said the pact was a sign the two sides wanted to better manage ties as they grow and compete for resources and allies in Asia and beyond. “The two countries are emerging powers, whose respective strategic profiles are intersecting at multiple points,” Saran wrote in a column in the Business Standard newspaper.

China’s close relationship with India’s main rival Pakistan, — as well as other neighbours such as Sri Lanka, Myanmar Bangladesh and Nepal — has given an urgency to New Delhi’s strategy of forging ties with Washington, Japan and Australia, along with Southeast Asian nations.

“On the Chinese side there is concern that its more assertive posture of the past couple of years had triggered a rapid and continuing build up of counterveiling coalitions in the strategic Indo-Pacific theatre,” Saran said.

Swaran Singh, an expert on Indo-Chinese relations at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, said the pact gave momentum to future talks but its relevance would depend on the wider relationship. “For 25 years, India and Pakistan have had a hot line and the generals are supposed to ask each other what they had for breakfast,” Singh said. “But when the relationship is bad, nobody picks up the phone.”
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