Tehran, Baku discuss joint projects implementation process

During a telephone conversation between Iran’s Finance and Economic Minister Farhad Dejpasand and Azerbaijan’s Deputy Prime Minister Shahin Mustafayev on Tuesday evening, the two sides discussed the process of implementing Iran-Azerbaijan joint projects.

As reported by IRNA, the two officials also explored the ways to expand bilateral ties in different fields of trade, industry, agriculture, tourism, communication and information technology, as well as transit.

In early March 2017, Azerbaijan officially launched a rail link with Iran by sending a train across the border to Iran’s northern city of Astara thus taking an ambitious multimodal transport project that connects northern Europe to India closer to reality, Press TV reported at the time.

The train arrived in Iran simultaneously with a visit to the Islamic Republic by Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev where he discussed the implementation of the North-South Transport Corridor (NSTC) with Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani.

Aliyev told reporters after meeting Rouhani that the NSTC was an important project, stressing that it could have positive effects on the economies of its host countries.

The NSTC is a multi-modal route to link India and West Asia to the Caucasus, Central Asia and Europe.

The ship, road and rail route connects India’s Mumbai to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas and further to Baku in Azerbaijan as well as Astrakhan, Moscow and St Petersburg in Russia before stretching to northern Europe and Scandinavia.

In addition to Iran, India and Russia, countries that are on board to integrate into the transit network include Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Turkey, Tajikistan, Oman, Syria and Bulgaria.