Left rejects govt uranium claim

By OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

New Delhi, May 23: The Left parties said that the government should not try to push for the Indo-US nuclear deal by saying that the country was facing a shortage of uranium which was affecting nuclear power generation.

"We are not buying this argument. We are unable to understand how this shortage is taking place as the government estimates show there is enough uranium to produce 10,000 MW of power when the current production is only 4,000 MW," CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat said on Friday.

His statement came days ahead of the UPA-Left meeting on the nuclear deal in which the two sides are discussing proposals on the draft of an India-specific safeguards agreement with the IAEA.

"The so-called fuel shortage is being made a plea to sign the deal," CPI general secretary A.B. Bardhan said. Reacting to reports about fuel shortages affecting nuclear reactors, Mr Karat said, "What is disturbing is to paint the temporary shortage as a permanent scarcity in order to push the nuclear deal."

Quoting a press release of the Nuclear Power Corporation and a former director of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, the CPI(M) leader said that the shortage was "temporary", and was proved by the estimates of the public sector firm. "The current shortage of uranium is certainly not because the India-US deal has not come through, since the 10,000 MW plan was finalised purely on the basis of proven Indian uranium reserves long before any deal with the US was in the horizon," Mr Karat said. The CPI(M) leader said a "temporary mismatch" between demand and supply of uranium "cannot be the basis to plunge the country into an India-US deal with far-reaching adverse implications."

The government, he said, would reply to the clarifications sought by the Left parties at the May 28 meeting of the UPA-Left committee on the nuclear deal. "But our stand remains. We are not for operationalisation of the 123 agreement," Mr Karat said. Asked whether they would withdraw support if the government took steps to operationalise the deal, he said, "The government has not yet decided to move ahead." On a more lighter note, he said, "We don’t think the government wants to commit Hara Kiri."

"We have not completed discussions on the safeguards agreement. Since they have not given us the text (of the safeguards agreement), we are trying to extract as much as we can from the government," Mr Karat said.