Washington: The US-India nuclear deal has drifted dangerously since it was signed in 2008, Washington Post quoted analysts and former negotiators from both countries as saying.
The paper said the risk now is that other countries, particularly Russia and France, might benefit from all the hard work that the United States put into the deal.
The landmark agreement was supposed to allow the sale of nuclear reactors and fuel to India, even though the country has nuclear weapons but has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Its advocates said it would bring tens of billions in business to the United States and create thousands of jobs, while also cementing a new partnership between the two nations to counter China’s rise.
The newspaper reported that American companies have not yet sold any reactors or equipment to India. American nuclear fuel firms, which face no legal or policy hurdles, have also not begun selling to India.
India’s enthusiasm for nuclear power has been dented by the Fukushima accident, and by problems in finding available land to build reactors. Meanwhile, onerous conditions imposed by India’s parliament on suppliers of nuclear equipment have tilted the playing field away from private-sector American companies in favor of state-owned companies from Russia and France, analysts say.
“The Obama administration has done everything it can to implement the agreement,” said Ambassador Nicholas Burns, an undersecretary of state in the Bush administration who spent three years negotiating the agreement. “The problem from my perspective is on the Indian side. We haven’t seen the same degree of political commitment to follow it through.”
Singh put his government’s survival on the line to pass the deal. But in a country still scarred by the Bhopal gas disaster of 1984, he was powerless to prevent the passage last August of a law that would make suppliers of nuclear equipment liable for massive claims in the event of a nuclear accident during the reactor’s life.
That raises the risk of doing business in India to levels that American private-sector companies and their insurers cannot accept, but state-backed companies in Russia and France, with the much deeper pockets of their respective governments, might be able to live with. And it puts India far out of step with other countries, which put liability solely on plant operators.
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