The statement assumes significance in the context that the US has been raising issues regarding the nuclear liability bill.
Less than a week before US president Barack Obama is scheduled to arrive in India, minister of state for science and technology, Prithviraj Chavan, has said that India will not accept any condition on the nuclear technology from foreign countries.
The statement assumes significance in the context that the US has been raising issues regarding the nuclear liability bill.
Senior officials in the department of atomic energy (DAE) said there have been four meetings recently with US industrialists and lawyers to address concerns regarding the bill. They said talks are currently on and issues are yet to be sorted, implying that the US administration is yet to agree on all aspects of the bill.
“We won’t accept any conditions. The pricing must be competitive and environmental concerns must be fully met, only then we will import nuclear technology and components from other countries,” said Chavan, who is also minister of state in the prime minister’s office. He was speaking at the founder’s day celebrations of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (Barc) on Friday.
Attacking the NPT regime, Chavan said that India will not sign any unequal treaties. “India has achieved all this [progress in its nuclear programme] without compromising on our basic principles. We are absolutely committed to our three-stage nuclear programme and won’t compromise on it. We will not accept any obligations nor will we accept the two-tier system of the P-5 countries,” he said. The P-5 countries — US, USSR (former), UK, China and France —had detonated atomic bombs before January 1967.
Significantly, Chavan said the government is open to the Indian private sector participating in the country’s nuclear programme, but only as minority stakeholders. While talking about the expanding nuclear programme, Chavan said an amendment in the Atomic Energy Act is being contemplated.
Referring to the visits of Obama and French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Chavan said each meeting will have a nuclear component to it “upfront or not as the expansion of the nuclear programme must not be taken lightly”.
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