The $10b project is ambitious and fraught with risk. For a start nearly half the 1,800km route crosses Afghanistan where security has worsened over the past couple of years. This week the Asian Development Bank cut funding for a Turkmenistan-Tajikistan rail project that also crossed north Afghanistan because of security concerns.

Still, at the official opening ceremony for the TAPI pipeline in Mary, Turkmenistan, Mr Berdymukhamedov was in an upbeat mood.

“TAPI is designed to become a new effective step towards the formation of the modern architecture of global energy security, a powerful driver of economic and social stability in the Asian region,” media quoted him as saying.

By December 2018, so the plan goes, Turkmenistan should start pumping 33b cubic metres of gas a year to India.

But, as Anupama Sen, senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, explained for India, TAPI has always been more of a political, rather than gas supply, project. She said India is increasing coal production to meet power demand as it is cheaper than importing gas.

“India’s negotiations over TAPI have been driven by diplomacy,” she said.

India has been trying for years to bolster its influence in Central Asia where Russia and China are so dominant. It lost out in 2013 on a stake in the Kashagan oil field in the Kazakh sector of the Caspian Sea to China. TAPI now gives it a stake in Central Asia.