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Firing the critical mass
The government's victory in the trust vote in parliament is only the beginning of what promises to be a long journey for India in its quest for energy security.
- By Chiranjib Sengupta, Deputy Night Editor
- Published: 00:03 July 24, 2008
- Image Credit: Illustration: Nino Jose Heredia/Gulf News
Ask a farmer in India's southern state of Andhra Pradesh - where Congress party president Sonia Gandhi held a massive public rally recently - on the benefits of nuclear power and chances are you'll be met with a blank stare. Ask a school teacher in India's rural heartland of Madhya Pradesh or a factory hand in the eastern coal belts on how they view India's civilian nuclear agreement with the US, and may be they'll throw the same question back to you.
Yet these are the people - the masses of India - who are ostensibly expected to benefit from the much-hyped and much maligned civilian nuclear deal with Washington if and when it goes through. When debate over the deal unravelled in the Indian parliament in a two-day special session - with frequent interludes in the forms of interjections, disruptions, cat calls and finally bags of cash - it became pretty clear that the sub text of the deliberation was all about numbers: not of the nuclear kind, but the number of heads each party could muster.
And as Agatha Sangma of the Congress party, the youngest MP ever in Parliament at 27, put it, she wasn't sure what the nuclear deal was all about but she would vote for it because she "intuitively" liked it. And she was being rather candid than several of her much senior colleagues. Ateeq Ahmad, one of the six lawmakers who was released from prison so that he could vote in parliament, faced a similar problem: he couldn't understand what the deal was going to do for India, despite listening "very attentively" to the debate. So contrary to his party's expectations, Ahmad decided to vote against the government.
Despite such unpredictable embarrassments, the end result of the bruising debate was a sweet vindication of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's stand that the deal was in national interest and would open the doors to a whole new era of nuclear technology. Singh, hitherto known as India's prime minister by accident, emerged as one of the toughest leaders the country has seen so far with his resolute support for the deal and the stinging rebuff he delivered to Opposition leader L.K. Advani, which unfortunately was drowned in the din of the House. Perhaps Advani will never invoke his astrologer again. And as for the bribery scandal: honesty was never quite part of any political party's national agenda, was it?
But as the consequence of the trust vote sinks in, as the euphoria, the cynicism and the media frenzy die down on perhaps the most televised confidence motion in India's history, it'll be time to tackle some hard questions.
The deal, as we know, would open India's civilian nuclear programme to oversight for the first time, though its nuclear weapons projects would remain off limits. In return, India would gain access to new technology and fuel from the US, and potentially be able to lower energy prices by generating nuclear power.
Enthusiasm
But in its enthusiasm to push ahead with the deal, the Indian government - and the nation - is now entering unpredictable territory. Despite the widely held belief that signing up to the so-called 123 Agreement will safeguard India's energy security and act as a buffer against oil market volatilities, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the nuclear watchdog which must clear the deal, has never been known to promise uninterrupted supplies of uranium to keep India's nuclear reactors running. In fact India will always be dependent on the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) - a collection of nations that monitors the sale of nuclear technology - for its uranium imports, and this is likely to emerge as a key point of contention as the deal goes into advanced stages of approval.
Then there's the Hyde Act. This was specially enacted in 2006 to exempt India from fulfilling certain requirements of the US Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and enable the India-US deal. The exemptions and Congressional approval are however, subject to an enormous number of clauses and conditions, including proof that "India is taking the necessary steps to secure nuclear and other sensitive materials and technology..." (Section 104/a/6). In fact the sections are replete with scenarios that could in theory impact India's foreign policy and jeopardise regional geopolitics, no matter whether Delhi comes up with its own counter act.
And then there's the real cost benefit of nuclear power. Currently nuclear power is estimated to account for about 3 per cent of India's total power output. If new reactors go critical without any time overrun, it could account for nearly 10 per cent of the total production by 2020. However, producing nuclear power is not cheap, at least compared to thermal power in India. Unless future governments draw up a comprehensive energy policy to optimise power generation, the dream Sonia Gandhi bubbled out in Nellore would remain just that.
All these concerns, however, would remain mere hypotheses if the logistics of pushing the deal through doesn't work out. New Delhi plans to take the deal to the IAEA board by August and subsequently to the NSG. The deal then needs to be signed by the US Congress to become a law. The new Democrat-controlled Congress could be lukewarm to a deal backed by George W. Bush, and even if it relents, it must be in session for 30 continuous days to hold a final vote.
Given that the Congress ends its session in September, it's now a race against time to keep the agreement alive. In fact a curious by-product of this deadline could be the scenario that the IAEA and NSG clear the deal but it stalls at the Congress: India could then potentially trade in nuclear technologies with other countries but not the US.
It's thus a two-pronged challenge that Singh and his government must surmount - addressing some real concerns as India forges along with the deal, and preventing it from an untimely demise. The government's victory in the trust vote in parliament is only the beginning of what promises to be a long and critical journey for India in its quest for energy security, and it'll surely need to watch its steps.
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