The text essentially consists of these parts: The preamble, the general considerations, safeguards procedure and miscellaneous considerations.

In the preamble India has embedded important concepts like sovereignty, nuclear activities and expanding international cooperation on a reliable, stable and predictable basis.

The general considerations are specific to India. The IAEA usually has an agreement for individual reactors, like for example India has for the Koodankulam reactor.

There is a departure from convention in the safeguards procedure. India and the IAEA will have an agreement that specifies 66 types of safeguards for all civilian reactors in the country. This is an umbrella agreement and applies to all civilian reactors and there won't be any reactor-specific agreement.

The miscellaneous considerations consist of clauses for agency inspectors and settlement of disputes should they arise in the future.

What is the legal sanctity of the text?

The text is in keeping with the guidelines of the Vienna Convention. So there won't be any legal trouble. "The entire text rose from the Vienna guidelines and stands on that one single pillar," Narayanan said.

Kakodkar further explained that the 66 safeguards specified are applied to all non-NPT nations. "What we have done is instead of have an agreement for individual reactors, we told the IAEA to draw a single umbrella agreement that will cover all those reactors that India declares as civilian,"

Both Grover and Kakodkar clearly specified that the agreement would not apply to India's strategic programme, which will continue.

In terms of any disagreement in the future, will it stop India from getting nuclear fuel?

The first thing that should be understood, the experts said, is that the agency does not supply fuel. It is the 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Group that will provide the fuel. "Through this particular safeguards agreement, we have to create conditions that help us in importing fuel and using it in our reactors.

Any supply agreement has to be between the supplier and us so we will have to build in, as we have been doing always, a strong commitment on the part of suppliers to continue, whether it is fuel or spares or whatever," Dr Kakodkar said.

Another key asset in the text is that it provided a strategic fuel reserve to be used for the lifetime operation of those reactors.

"It means we can create a bank, and can fill it with fuel as and when we get fuel from other countries," Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran said. He said this will allow for India's programme to go ahead without any disruption even if a dispute arises in the future.

Kakodkar also said that with foreign supplies, it has always been India's policy to "put whatever comes from outside under IAEA safeguards".

He said, "In the India-specific safeguards agreement, India has very strongly connected such cooperation agreements with other countries and supply agreements with supplier countries with our going in for safeguards with IAEA. So there is this linking which says we are going in for IAEA safeguards because we are also talking about the supply agreements where continuity is built and then we can develop legally from that point onwards."

Image: The Tarapur Atomic Power Plant
Photographs: http://www.dae.gov.in

Also read: Let the nuclear deal go through: Brajesh Mishra

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