New Delhi, July 27: The safeguards agreement and Additional Protocol that India will sign with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will give a high degree of control over the country’s civilian nuclear programme to the agency, experts believe. This follows from a nuclear bargain with the US.

While sources in the government have suggested that India would have flexibility in signing the Additional Protocol, experts, however, believe there will be little freedom to resist a strict regime of reporting and international inspection of nuclear activities.

The IAEA collects, monitors and verifies data relating to a country’s nuclear programme to ensure that civilian nuclear facilities are not used for military purposes. But the interlocking between the two in India may be such that separating them may not be easy. India has, however, made such a bilateral commitment to the US. This will now be verified by the IAEA.

The control sought by the IAEA is mind-boggling. Its inspectors will have access to all parts of India’s nuclear fuel cycle, including its uranium mines, fuel fabrication and enrichment plants, waste sites, “as well as to any other location where nuclear material is or may be present”. This may also entail separating uranium mines for civilian and military purposes, for example. Such are the stringent requirements of the IAEA’s Additional Protocol that all nuclear R&D plans for the coming 10 years and personal details of researchers also have to be supplied.

The Additional Protocol only extends the safeguards agreement. Essentially, two kinds of verification measures are carried out by the IAEA. The first set comprises verifying the reports provided by a country on its declared nuclear material and activities. This is based on nuclear material accountancy, nuclear containment and surveillance techniques, including cameras installed by the IAEA at the country’s nuclear facilities. The IAEA can then carry out ad hoc, routine and special inspections as well as make safeguard visits to verify data.

The second set consists of “strengthening the IAEA’s inspection capabilities”. This is done through the Additional Protocol which complements the safeguards agreement. It gives “expanded rights of access” to the IAEA not only “to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material but also to provide assurances as to the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in a state”.

As India is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and IAEA safeguards normally follow as obligation under the NPT, the US is trying to create a half-way house for putting the civilian nuclear facilities in India under the safeguards. Non-nuclear weapon members of the NPT are prohibited from making nuclear bombs ? the safeguards are meant to ensure precisely this ? but India already has nuclear weapons. The Additional Protocol signed with the IAEA, therefore, may not exactly be the same as for the NPT countries. But will it be any less exacting?

Nuclear experts believe that the activities which the IAEA has specified in its safeguards and the Additional Protocol are extremely onerous. India, they claim, may not have the choice of accepting some and rejecting others. “Is India willing to cede this degree of control to the IAEA? And if not, how far is it willing to go? Do we really have any flexibility and if so how much?” asked a nuclear expert.

Yet another nuclear expert, who wanted a public debate on the agreement with the US, said India could not expect that the US would take a big step in its favour and not expect an equally big step in return. India will have to agree to all the safeguard regimes without any choice, he felt.