NEW DELHI (Online News) – A joint working group which is negotiating the terms of the Iran-Pakistan-India Gas Pipeline, has reached an agreement that the pipeline should be built in three separate stages and that each country would be responsible for the part of the pipeline on its own soil, ANI reported.

The total cost of the proposed project will be around 7 billion dollars.

Iranian Deputy Minister of Petroleum Hadi Nejad-Hosseinian has said that the structure of the project has now been clearly defined and that each country would have responsibility over the part of the pipeline passing through its territory.

This means that Iran would build 1,115 km of the pipeline, Pakistan another 707 km and India 850 km of pipeline. Construction work will start next year, with the first gas deliveries are expected in 2010.

The delivery point for Pakistan’s gas will its borders with Iran, while that for India it will be the Pakistan-India border. Back in 1995, Pakistan and Iran signed a preliminary agreement for construction of a natural gas pipeline linking the Iranian South Pars natural gas field in the Persian Gulf with Karachi, Pakistan’s main industrial port located at the Arabian Sea. However, Iran later proposed an extension of the pipeline from Pakistan into India.

Initially, the Indian government was reluctant to enter into any agreement with Pakistan due to the historically tense relationship between the two neighbors. As an alternative, India suggested the development of a deep-sea pipeline where no threat to security of resources could exist, but later on, New Delhi decided to join the project, which appears to be beneficial to all sides.

However, commercial terms have not yet been agreed for the controversial project that will supply Iranian gas from South Pars gas-field. The joint working group aims to discuss them next month in New Delhi.