Decision on diesel decontrol difficult now: Oil Secy

Oil Secretary, S Sundereshan said he sees the need for some formula for subsidy sharing by 2011-end. He said that the government would work on an innovative solution for diesel prices in 2011, but said that the decision on diesel decontrol would be difficult at the moment. 

Sundereshan added that the purchase of major upstream assets abroad is on the agenda in 2011. "It is fair to say we have asked the finance minister for lower duties," he added. Below is a verbatim transcript of Sundereshan's interview with CNBC-TV18's Nayantara Rai. Also watch the accompanying video for more. Q: APM gas prices being increased, petrol prices being deregulated and in principle decision to deregulate diesel prices - what can we look forward to in 2011? A: I have four major goals. One is the successful completion of the NELP IX. The closing date for bids is sometime in the middle of March. I hope that, that will be a success. 34 blocks are on offer, the road shows are on and we want this interest in exploration in India to be substantially revised. Secondly we have set ourselves a major policy goal in the year and that is to evolve some sort of a mechanism for pool pricing of gas. When we started on this path a year ago, I said that gas pricing involves two real issues; one is that the price of gas from various sources in India should be approximately similarly priced. We have achieved that with increase in price of APM gas but this does not resolve the issue, because there are some parts of India who have to be fed exclusively on LNG and there are other parts of India which have access to natural gas. So you can