The Hindu : National : Nuclear scientist fails to get U.S. visa

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Feb 17, 2006

National

National

Nuclear scientist fails to get U.S. visa

R. Ramachandran

Placid Rodriguez

New Delhi: A former director of the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR), Kalpakkam, and one of the chief architects of the Indian nuclear breeder programme, Dr. Placid Rodriguez, was in effect denied a visa by the U.S. Consulate in Chennai for attending a conference.

Dr. Rodriguez is now the Raja Ramanna Fellow and AICTE-INAE Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, IIT Madras, Chennai. He was recently elected President of the Indian Nuclear Society.

This comes in the context of the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal — which appears to have hit a roadblock on the breeder issue — and the coming visit of the U.S. President.

Dr. Rodriguez had been invited by the organisers of two symposia at the Annual Meeting of "The Metals, Minerals and Materials Society (TMS)" scheduled to be held during March 12-16. He was slated to present two papers at these symposia. One of these is in honour of Prof. Monroe Wechsler, his former teacher and colleague at Oak Ridge and a professor at the University of Tennessee. The other is in honour of Prof. David Brandon, an eminent metallurgist from Israel.

Dr. Rodriguez applied for a U.S. visa on November 8, 2005, and was due to leave for the U.S. on March 8. The earliest appointment for a visa interview that he got was on February 16. When he presented himself for the interview at the Consulate in Chennai — this in itself is insulting for someone as distinguished as Dr. Rodriguez who has visited the U.S. several times during his earlier posts — he was apparently asked to answer a mandatory questionnaire by e-mail as he came under a special category (known as Visas Mantis for certain sensitive scientific and technological areas and requiring interagency clearance).

This, Dr. Rodriguez was told, would be forwarded to Washington for clearance. But it was made clear to him that there was absolutely no chance of a response from Washington before his scheduled departure. The officials, it seems, advised him to reschedule his departure. This would seem strange considering that he was being invited by a U. S. organisation for addressing a specific conference.

Dr. Rodriguez earlier served in the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), two of three strategic establishments of the country. In these capacities he has visited the U. S. six times and many of these visits were, in fact, on diplomatic passports. The last time he visited the U. S. was in February 2003 on a diplomatic passport when he was Chairman of the Recruitment and Assessment Centre (RAC) of the DRDO and, interestingly, it was also to attend the annual meeting of the TMS.

Visas Mantis was applied extensively to Indian scientists in the wake of the Pokhran tests in 1998. For Visas Mantis referral, a Technology Alert List is maintained by the U.S. State Department, which includes various facets of materials technology.

The Visas Mantis procedure was revised in February 2005, allowing U. S. embassies and consulates to issue visas without the mandatory interagency clearance provided the application satisfied a few conditions, chief among them being that the applicant's proposed visit is for the same activity as before and the person would be visiting the same U.S. facility or organisation. However, such clearances, according to State Department regulations, are valid only for one year.

As Dr. Rodriguez's visit is for the same meeting and activity as in 2003, his case would seem not to satisfy only the 12-month limit for the validity of the earlier Visas Mantis clearance. If the U.S genuinely desired strategic partnership in the nuclear field this could have been easily waived.

But more important, the State Department's release dated February 11, 2005, clearly states that, "by increasing staffing, improving systems and working with our interagency partners, the Department has been able to decrease the average time to obtain Visas Mantis clearance to less than 14 days."

So, even if a new clearance procedure were set in motion today, Dr. Rodriguez should be able to travel as planned quite contrary to what the U.S. Consulate has told him.

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