India hopes to sign long-pending nuclear agreements with Russia

New Delhi: India is hoping to sign long-pending agreements with Russia to build two additional nuclear power plants in Tamil Nadu. The pacts have been held up by questions over who would be liable should there be a nuclear accident at the plants to be set up by Russian firms but run by India’s Nuclear Power Corp. of India Ltd (NPCIL).

“We hope we will be in a position to sign the agreements very soon,” foreign secretary Sujatha Singh told reporters on Wednesday.

Delegations from both countries were in the process of finalizing a text, a person close to the developments on the Russian side said.

Sergey Kirienko, director general of Russia’s state-owned nuclear company Rosatom, was in New Delhi on Monday for meetings with NPCIL officials to finalize the text of the proposed techno-commercial agreement for the third and fourth power plant units at Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu.

Moscow has already set up two 1,000MW nuclear reactors in Kudankulam under a pact signed in 1998, which predates India’s tough nuclear damage liability law enacted in 2010. The plant’s first unit will begin commercial operations in April and the second by December—both delayed by local protests.

Russian deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin was also in New Delhi on Wednesday and met with foreign minister Salman Khurshid and national security advisor Shiv Shankar Menon, a Russian diplomat said, requesting anonymity. The issue was discussed at the both meetings, the diplomat said. “Rogozin indicated that both sides were nearing the signing of the document,” said the unnamed Russian official.

The nuclear liability law, which sets rules for compensating victims if there is an accident, is seen as an obstacle rather than an enabler for international firms to enter India’s nuclear energy market because it imposes steep penalties on suppliers rather than operators.

In a related development, India and Russia on Wednesday agreed to set up a joint study group to explore the possibility of negotiating a comprehensive free trade agreement between New Delhi and the customs union of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia.

This was decided at a meeting between Rogozin and trade minister Anand Sharma.