Old friends India, Russia to make a sweet N-deal

India will on Monday sign a nuclear agreement with Russia on far greater favourable terms than the one it has with the US. The Russian deal will implicitly grant India the right to process spent fuel and facilitate the transfer of enrichment and reprocessing technologies.

The agreement will be signed by prime minister Manmohan Singh, who reached Moscow on Sunday for a three-day state visit. A senior official called the proposed Indo-Russian agreement a “path-finder and path-breaker”. Contrasting it with the 123 agreement between India and the US, he said even if the Russian agreement is called off, there will not be any interruption of ongoing projects and fuel supply. According to the American agreement, India will have to return both fuel and equipment if it is called off.

The Indo-Russian ‘Inter-Government Agreement on Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy’ will replace the agreement of 1988 under which the Kodankulam nuclear plant was set up in Tamil Nadu.

Foreign secretary Nirupama Rao said Singh’s visit will also witness agreements for extending Indo-Russian military-technical cooperation to 2020, after-sales support of Russian military systems in India, and extending a credit line of $100 million by the Export-Import Bank of India to a Russian bank for the purchase of some equipment.

The countries will also sign a protocol on the joint development of a multirole transport aircraft (MTA) and issue a joint declaration on strengthening strategic partnership.

The visit will also aim to boost the traditionally dull private sector interactions between the countries. A powerful group of industrialists is meeting under the recently-formed Indo-Russian CEOs’ Council, co-chaired by Reliance Group chairman Mukesh Ambani and Sistema Corporation chief Vladimir Evtushenkov.

A senior government official said: “Russia is perhaps our most important partner on many areas like defence, nuclear and oil.”

A better deal
India and the then Soviet Union signed an agreement for the supply of two 1,000-MW light-water reactors to India in November 1988. The reactors were to be build at Koodankulam in Tamil Nadu.

But before a final contract for the reactors could be signed, the Soviet Union collapse in December 1991. The agreement in its final form was signed in 1998. It stated mutual obligations with precision and left no room for ambiguity over issues like the consequences of India conducting nuclear tests.

The nuclear agreement to be signed by the prime minister on Monday would be a lot less restrictive than the US 123 agreement.

Russia does not have restrictive internal laws like the American Atomic Energy Act and Hyde Act and all India needs to do in exchange for guaranteed fuel supply is to accept facility-specific international safeguards.