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An international consortium with the participation of seven countries is being created for the development of the North-South transport corridor, the legal structure for it is already being registered, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin said.

"The project is interesting to everyone: logistics companies, countries — everyone will attract money. The financial mechanism is calculated. There are seven parties in the consortium, people have looked at the transport corridors, the traces have been approved," he said.

When creating this corridor, it is planned to link cargo transportation by roads and railways through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, as well as to integrate into the transport corridor communication with Iran and India through ports in the Caspian Sea and through railway tracks skirting the Caspian Sea on both sides.

"We need to understand that this will not be one road on which all cargo will be concentrated, but a network of railway and transport routes. Somewhere it will be necessary to expand existing roads, somewhere - their mutual linking. An important issue is the creation of cheap cargo transshipment."

According to Khusnullin, in terms of cargo traffic, the transport corridor will be comparable to the Suez Canal and will reach an indicator of 100 million tons per year. "At the first stage, we expect 15-30 million tons," the Russian Deputy Prime Minister said.

He also added that for the implementation of projects within the consortium, most likely, it will be necessary to attract bank financing, writes Prime.

Container traffic on the North-South MTK increased fivefold in four months of 2023 compared to the same period last year, said Deputy Head of the Ministry of Transport of the Russian Federation Valentin Ivanov.

An intergovernmental agreement on the creation of a multimodal North-South transport corridor was signed by Russia, India and Iran in 2000. Later, the list of participants expanded to 14. Turkmenistan began the procedure for official accession to the agreement.

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