New Delhi, July 3 (IANS) The tightening of regulations by the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) for export of sensitive technologies was ‘not end of the road’, with major countries committing that they will stand by the cartel’s clean waiver to India, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao said.
The 46-nation NSG met in The Netherlands last week and ‘agreed to strengthen its guidelines on the transfer of sensitive enrichment and reprocessing technologies’.
The new guidelines have caused much disquiet in India, with some seeing in it a move to question the clean waiver granted by the NSG to India in September 2008 that re-opened the doors of global nuclear commerce for New Delhi after a gap of over three decades.
‘I am not going to draw a doomsday scenario from this. As I said, this is a dynamic process. Nothing is set in stone. This is not the end of the road. And as I said, there is a balance of interest and commitments involved. There are questions of reciprocity,’ an optimistic Rao told CNN-IBN’s Karan Thapar.
When asked if India had any leverages, she pointed out that India has plans to generate 60,000 MW of electricity from nuclear power by 2030. ‘We have an expanding nuclear industry. This is a great attraction to the rest of the world,’ said Rao.
She asserted that India got ‘confirmation from both the US and from France and from Russia that they stand by the commitments made to India in this regard and that there is no dilution of these commitments’.
