New Delhi: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh may have assured Parliament last August that "there is no question of allowing American inspectors to roam around our nuclear facilities." But under new U.S.-drafted rules adopted by the Nuclear Suppliers Group on the eve of last July's landmark deal, India will have to accept potentially intrusive inspections from any country it buys nuclear equipment from.

At its Oslo plenary last June, the NSG amended its crucial guideline governing the conditions under which the cartel's 45 members may sell equipment notified in their "trigger list" covering nuclear equipment and material. The new guidelines were only notified to the International Atomic Energy Agency in December 2005 and published on March 20 as INFCIRC/254/Rev.8/Part 1.

The new guideline states: "Suppliers should authorise [nuclear] transfers only upon formal government assurances from the recipient that... if the IAEA decides that the application of IAEA safeguards is no longer possible, the supplier and recipient should elaborate appropriate verification measures."

The guideline adds that if the recipient does not accept these measures, "it should allow at the request of the supplier the restitution of transferred and derived trigger list items".

Unlike the requirement for full-scope safeguards — which the U.S. is asking NSG countries to waive in the case of India — this new rule is not going to be changed. A precondition for imports, therefore, will be the acceptance of a parallel bilateral inspection regime. And a subsequent refusal by India to allow intrusive visits by inspectors from a supplier country could lead to that country demanding the return of nuclear facilities, materials and their derivatives.

India's objection

In his statement to the Rajya Sabha on August 17, Dr. Singh had objected to a clause in the Senate version of the U.S.-India nuclear cooperation Bill explicitly spelling out the fall-back safeguards Washington wanted India to agree to before it lifted nuclear sanctions on Delhi. This clause was reworded in the final Act but its intent was left untouched. Though supporters of the Act have said the clause would not be binding on the Bush administration or India, the fact that fall-back safeguards have been made part of the NSG guidelines suggests the Indian negotiators will have to wage a tough battle to keep intrusive third-party inspections off the agenda.

End-use verification

Until now, India has maintained that it will not allow the U.S. access beyond what is envisaged by the "End-Use Verification Agreement" signed as part of the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership in 2004. This provides for U.S. inspectors to visit the "balance of plant" (i.e. non-reactor) portion of an Indian nuclear facility where any American dual-use item might be used.

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