India, US to finetune N-draft before going to NSG5 Mar 2008, 0149 hrs IST,Indrani Bagchi,TNN
NEW DELHI: With the MEA-DAE negotiating team returning from Vienna with a draft of the safeguards agreement, India and the US will put their heads together to study the draft and work out how best to pitch the nuclear deal which includes the July 18 joint statement, separation plan, 123 agreement and the safeguards agreement to the 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).
This is very important, because it will be this document that the US will take to the NSG for a "clean" exemption that India wants. It will be the US that will have to do all the heavy lifting at the NSG, therefore, it's important for both sides to work out acceptable language. So while the draft is more or less done, a little bit of tweaking is still to be done.
Of course, before that, the government has to get the draft cleared by the UPA-Left coordination committee. Left had allowed the government to go to the IAEA in exchange for a commitment that it would be shown the draft before it was taken to the NSG.
However, what is already making news in the international nuclear circuit is the "speed" with which India and the IAEA have worked out an agreement. Countries like the US and China took several years to complete their own safeguards agreements, so getting it out in under five months with such a difficult brief is "commendable", sources said.
The safeguards agreement was a difficult one, because it entailed working out a unique template for a non-NPT signatory but with a clear nuclear weapons programme. Besides, the agreement is no ordinary one. Apart from the technical specifications, India wanted its rights under the 123 agreement of fuel supplies etc to figure in the agreement. This made things doubly difficult.
The final product is likely to see the facility-specific safeguards extended to clusters of facilities. Sources said these would be reactor-related "upstream facilities". This was the easy part. Then came the centrepiece of the safeguards pact the dedicated reprocessing facility. The pact hammered out the procedures for monitoring of materials and their safeguards within the dedicated facility. The IAEA will maintain a great degree of oversight over the construction of the facility.
In the "sensitive" areas like fuel supply assurances, India and the US will work with a set of "friendly" suppliers of nuclear fuel to India, in case of any disruptions. Ultimately, the safeguards will not be as intrusive as NSG members, particularly the Europeans, would like. This might make it tough going at the NSG, as well as at the US Congress.
India, US to finetune N-draft before going to NSG-India-The Times of India