Friday, December 2 2005 19:24 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

New Delhi: India would focus on developing a long-standing energy partnership with Russia and sign four key agreements on space and defense cooperation during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's three-day visit to Moscow beginning Sunday.

While India has already acquired a major stake in the Sakhalin-I oil and gas project by investing 2.7 billion dollars, it is also looking at participating in Sakhalin-III and bidding for exploration blocks in the Siberia region, besides being keenly interested in equity partnership with Russian oil majors like Gazprom, Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran told reporters here.

In the energy sector, Moscow was interested in participating in the construction of transnational gas pipelines between Iran-Pakistan-India as also Turkmenistan- Afghanistan-Pakistan and India.

Besides the crucial military Intellectual Property Right (IPR) agreement, an accord is to be signed to amend the Indo-Russian Military-Technical Programme till 2010 to enhance and expand strategic partnership relations, he said.

The space agencies of the two countries would also sign a Technology Safeguard Agreement to operationalise the 2004 pact on the joint use of space-based Global Navigational Satellite System (GLONASS) to end the dependency on the US Pentagon- controlled Global Positioning System (GPS) in military and civil applications.

It provides for the joint development of new generation Glonass-K navigational satellites and their launch from India, aided by Indian launch vehicles. ISRO and Russian Space Agency Roskosmos would also ink an agreement on cooperation in Solar Physics and geophysical research.