August 17, 2003	Sunday	Jumadi-us-Sani 18, 1424

BENAULIM, Aug 16: India, which is sitting on a record pile of foreign exchange reserves, will prepay $1.5 billion of its external debt soon, a senior official of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said on Saturday.

“Another $1.5 billion to be pre-paid, is in the pipeline and it will happen soon,” said T.C. Nair, chief general manager of RBI, told the national assembly of the Forex Association of India in the western Indian state of Goa. Nair did not specify a date.

In the financial year to March 2003, India prepaid multilateral loans totalling $2.8bn. Earlier in the year, the government said it plans to repay bilateral debt of $1.5bn to more than a dozen countries ahead of schedule in the year to March 2004.

The countries include the Netherlands, the Russian Federation, Canada, Sweden, Italy, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Kuwait, Spain, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Australia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Latest available data showed that India’s debt rose to $105bn at end-Dec 2002 from $98.8bn nine months earlier.—Reuters