No nuclear deal with Russia
MOSCOW:
Russia cannot use the 1989 agreement on Kudankulam nuclear power plants
to "grandfather" an agreement for four additional plants for India,
officials accompanying PM Manmohan Singh on his visit to Russia said.
India was hoping to get the Russians to work out an intergovernmental agreement under cover of the original agreement but it will have to wait until it gets a clear exemption from the NSG before Russia moves on it. The bottomline is that until India completes the formalities with the IAEA and NSG, there is almost no nuclear agreement that it can sign.
India was hoping to get the Russians to work out an intergovernmental agreement under cover of the original agreement but it will have to wait until it gets a clear exemption from the NSG before Russia moves on it. The bottomline is that until India completes the formalities with the IAEA and NSG, there is almost no nuclear agreement that it can sign.
But
even as India loses out yet again in its attempt to move forward in the
nuclear field largely due to its own shortcomings, China has been
galloping ahead. Last week, China and Russia signed an agreement where
the latter agreed to supply uranium, enrichment capacity and two new
power reactors to China.
Russia will supply uranium enrichment capacity in the form of gas centrifuges. This and other framework agreements were signed by Sergei Kiriyenko, head of Russia's Federal Atomic Energy Agency (Rosatom) and Zhang Qinwei, chairman of China's Defence Science, Technology and Industry Committee.
India will have to live with the memorandum of intent (MOI) signed with Russia during Vladimir Putin's last visit in January 2007. That envisaged a more detailed civil nuclear cooperation with India, but only after the IAEA and the NSG had given a collective thumbs up.
There was an expectation that India and Russia might find some language to suit them in the original agreement, but foreign secretary Shiv Shankar Menon said the original agreement specifically covered two reactors and nothing more.
But as PM Manmohan Singh arrived to a ceremonial welcome in Moscow, senior officials were at pains to dismiss any talk of a chill in relations between India and its oldest strategic partner. "I have to deal with the Russians on very sensitive issues," said national security advisor M K Narayanan. "From where I stand, our relations are very warm, sometimes even hot."
Officials said India and Russia were contemplating a comprehensive economic partnership agreement after a report by a joint study group employed to find ways of moving the economic relationship forward came in. And there would be significant cooperation between the two sides on a lunar ewxploration project, Chandrayaan 2.
indrani.bagchi@timesgroup.com
Russia will supply uranium enrichment capacity in the form of gas centrifuges. This and other framework agreements were signed by Sergei Kiriyenko, head of Russia's Federal Atomic Energy Agency (Rosatom) and Zhang Qinwei, chairman of China's Defence Science, Technology and Industry Committee.
India will have to live with the memorandum of intent (MOI) signed with Russia during Vladimir Putin's last visit in January 2007. That envisaged a more detailed civil nuclear cooperation with India, but only after the IAEA and the NSG had given a collective thumbs up.
There was an expectation that India and Russia might find some language to suit them in the original agreement, but foreign secretary Shiv Shankar Menon said the original agreement specifically covered two reactors and nothing more.
But as PM Manmohan Singh arrived to a ceremonial welcome in Moscow, senior officials were at pains to dismiss any talk of a chill in relations between India and its oldest strategic partner. "I have to deal with the Russians on very sensitive issues," said national security advisor M K Narayanan. "From where I stand, our relations are very warm, sometimes even hot."
Officials said India and Russia were contemplating a comprehensive economic partnership agreement after a report by a joint study group employed to find ways of moving the economic relationship forward came in. And there would be significant cooperation between the two sides on a lunar ewxploration project, Chandrayaan 2.
indrani.bagchi@timesgroup.com
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