Oil Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar, who this year secured cabinet approval for the pipeline first mooted in 1994, said the nuclear technology agreement with Washington was not a "quid pro quo" for abandoning the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline.

"I don't think there's any connection between the two," said Aiyar when asked if India had promised to scrap efforts to import natural gas from Iran in return for Washington providing nuclear technology and fuel for power generation, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

On Monday US President George W. Bush announced he would ask Congress as well as allied nations to lift sanctions preventing Indian access to civil nuclear technology after talks with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Washington.

India was denied access to large nuclear reactors and fuel under sanctions imposed on it after it conducted nuclear tests in 1974 and later in 1998.

Washington opposes the 2,600-kilometre (1,600-mile) pipeline, voicing its objections to New Delhi buying gas from Iran. The US accuses Iran of supporting terrorism and trying to build a nuclear bomb.

Aiyar, however, said India would press ahead with the negotiations on the 4.5-billion-dollar pipeline. "All difficulties notwithstanding, we will continue to proceed and we will, God willing, succeed."

The minister echoed remarks by premier Singh last week in Washington that the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline project was fraught with risks.

"In my view it is going to be extremely difficult to put together a financial consortium to finance the project and run as world-class project," Aiyar said.

But he added India's "enormous energy requirement cannot be met without accessing gas in Iran.

India imports 70 percent of its crude oil needs and produces just half the gas it requires. The fuel import requirements of the country of more than one billion people are seen growing rapidly as its economy surges.

"We are continuing with negotiations which at present are at a preliminary stage," Aiyar said.

In an interview in the Washington Post, Singh had said he was "realistic enough to realise that there are many risks" associated with the pipeline "considering all the uncertainties of the situation there in Iran."

"I don't know if any international consortium of bankers would probably underwrite this. But we are in a state of preliminary negotiations, and the background of this is we desperately need the supply of gas that Iran has."

Iran's proposal for the pipeline in the 1990s failed to make headway due to India's worries over the security of the pipeline passing through nuclear-armed rival Pakistan.

However relations between India and Pakistan have warmed since 2003, clearing the path for the three nations to discuss the pipeline.

Singh's comments have caused ripples back home. Opposition groups and the government's communist allies are demanding an explanation for his remarks and alleging that the Indian delegation secretly agreed to abandon the pipeline under US pressure.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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