India and the IAEA have stopped short of firming up a safeguards agreement after some tough negotiations over the past three days in Vienna but for the first time have parted on the note that “considerable progress” was achieved. Sources said a final agreement could only be confirmed after internal discussions in New Delhi.“Considerable progress has been achieved during the round of negotiation about a safeguards agreement between IAEA and India held this week. Consultations between India and the Agency will continue,” an IAEA official in Vienna told The Indian Express.The Indian team, led by DAE’s Strategic Planning head R B Grover, stayed on for an extra day to wrap up discussions on an agreement given that the government had instructed the team to make this the last round of talks. The team is leaving Vienna tonight.However, sources said, the key issue of acknowledging India’s “right to take corrective measures” — it’s not been defined — in case there is a disruption in fuel supplies seems to have been the sticking point. The IAEA’s problem stems from the fact that there is no precedent for this. For, the agency is of the view that it would be difficult to explain what “corrective measures” mean in the agreement when the document comes before the 35-member IAEA board. Moreover, the agency has never acted as a guarantor for fuel supplies.In the backdrop of the conversation between National Security Advisor M K Narayanan and IAEA Director General Mohammed El Baradei on the margins of the Munich Security Conference earlier this month, the IAEA is willing to make references to other documents like Separation Plan where this right is explicitly mentioned. India, for its part, was accommodating in dropping some other issues like its insistence on including the definition of “peaceful purposes” as stated in the 123 Agreement, but said it needed further internal consultations when it came to accepting the IAEA model of representing India’s right to take corrective measures.Barring this, sources said, all key issues including that of fuel supply assurances have been “broadly” resolved. The significant gain for India was IAEA agreeing to not insist on specifying the amount of fuel India can store for its reactors. This was important as India has negotiated with the US to be allowed to build a strategic fuel reserve to store fuel for the lifetime of its reactors. Clearly, a political call will be needed in India to go ahead with the draft on the table where most of the differences now stand settled. At the same time, the government is making diplomatic efforts at somehow trying to extract a concession from IAEA on this issue. What is encouraging for India is that it has got IAEA to agree to a unique and lengthy preamble which states all the reciprocal commitments under which New Delhi entered the nuclear deal and a specific recognition to the fact that agreement applies only to civilian reactors, thereby acknowledging the presence of a military programme.
