Doubling oil and gas production : A perspective
- The Sangai Express Editorial :: February 11 2016 -
It is Rs 1, 30,000 crore. This is indeed a huge amount.
If the Government of India is ready to invest such a huge amount, the return would be certainly enormous.
Since the Government of India came up with the idea of Look East Policy (now Act East Policy), the North East region and its people who have been neglected and marginalised all these decades are steadily becoming a focal point of attention for policy planners of the country and those sitting at the power corridors of New Delhi.
All along, underdevelopment of the North East region has been attributed to hostile or difficult terrain.
It was only with the conceptualization of the Look East Policy that the region’s poor connectivity struck the conscience of New Delhi mandarins.
Still the region’s transport infrastructure is far below the national benchmark.
This is a brief introduction of the developmental gap that exists between the North East region and the rest of the country.
But if we talk about natural resources, the region cannot be termed poor by any yardstick. The region has rich forest resources and huge reserves of fossil fuels.
In spite of its richness in natural resources, the region has been languishing in a malady called economic underdevelopment, not to mention about political unrest, due to marginalization, deprivation, corrupted public administration systems and of course poor connectivity.
Though late, New Delhi seems to have realized the strategic importance of the North East and it has already started projecting the region as India’s gateway to South East Asia and beyond.
With the Government of India ready to open its eastern borders, many multi-national companies and corporate houses have set their eyes on the region.
While New Delhi has formulated a grand policy called Hydrocarbon Vision 2030 for Northeast India which is aimed at doubling oil and natural gas output from the region, Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas had granted license to Jubiliant Oil and Gas Private Limited (JOGPL), based in the Netherlands for exploration and drilling works in two oil blocks in Manipur located in Jiribam (Imphal East), Tamenglong and Churachandpur districts of Manipur.
Whereas many people have been opposing oil and natural gas exploration in the State, many others see it as a rare opportunity for a long overdue outburst of economic boom.
Notably, it was in Digboi, Assam where the first oil well of the entire Asiatic continent was drilled.
The first refinery was started here as early as 1901. Apart from the oil industry, Assam has a vibrant tea industry but the socio-economic condition of Assamese people has improved very little since then which implies that the benefits of oil and tea industries do not reach common man.
In another word, all the benefits or rather profits earned from the fossil fuel and tea leaves have been accumulated in the hands of a few powerful, influential groups. Oil extracted from Assam accounts for 30 per cent of the total oil production in India.
After more than 100 years of its contribution, no visible development is witnessed in the rural areas of the state, specially where extraction takes place.
Given such a grim precedent, it would be too premature and too much to expect sudden socio-economic alleviation out of the fossil fuels discovered in the region including Manipur.
The exploration and drilling of oil by Jubilant Energy in Manipur was marked by protest and resistance from different sections of the local population and civil society bodies.
They argued that the exploration and drilling activities were initiated without the consent of the people of Manipur or without making the venture public.
As of now, we can only hope if doubling oil and natural gas production in the North East can alleviate the region’s socio-economic condition even by one notch.
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