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India hopes to wrap up safeguard agreement with IAEA

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Agencies

Posted online: Friday , January 11, 2008 at 06:19:51


New Delhi, January 11: India hopes to wrap up a safeguards agreement with IAEA later this month in Vienna before approaching the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) for changes to permit international nuclear commerce.

"We hope to do another round (of negotiations) in the middle of January in Vienna. We hope to wrap it up. The discussions are proceeding smoothly", Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon told reporters in New Delhi.

"We hope to reach a rapid and satisfactory conclusion", he said.

India needs to reach a safeguards agreement and then get the nod of the 45-member NSG for operationalising the Indo US civil nuclear deal.

Asked whether India would seek China's support at the NSG during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's three-day visit to Beijing beginning Sunday, Menon said "we have not actually come to that stage".

When it reaches the NSG, India would seek the support of all countries for an unconditional NSG exemption to it, he said.

Official sources said that the next round of talks is likely to take place from January 16.

The two sides had failed to reach an ‘agreed text' in the last round earlier this month.

It got stuck on the issue of India's right to hold its strategic reserve to cater to lifetime supply to its civilian nuclear plants.

There was also no meeting point on the issue of corrective measures to be undertaken in the event of stoppage of fuel to power plants, sources said.

It was important that India and IAEA come to some kind of understanding in the next round of talks and finalise the text otherwise India would not be able to meet the deadline to clinch the civil nuclear deal.

Only when IAEA prepares a final agreed text which has to be cleared by its Board of Governors, the US could go ahead with its talks with the 45-member Nuclear Supplier's Group to get a clean and uncondtional exemption for India to do nuclear commerce internationally.

The talks, a follow up to the Indo-US civil nuclear deal, are one of the pre-requisites for operationalisation of the deal first mooted in July 2005.

It is expected that the text, drafted by the IAEA, would be brought back before the 15-member UPA-Left committee for deliberations after the next round of talks, sources said.

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Pathetic Stone worshipers by True Hindu on 14 Jan 2008

Hindu fanatics are slave to the BJP and other fanatic politicians. Don't you narrowminded primates see that India needs energy? We have power outages everyday and there is not other solution to the issue other than this. why do say that India has to listen to everything that USA says? Have you even read the agreement? I doubt it. You just say it just because everyone else is saying it and you hate USA. Pathetic, I hope people like you get burned to death by muslims. So true religious individuals like me can live peacefully in India.

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