Manmohan Singh and wife Gursharan Kaur arrive in St Petersburg on Sunday. (AFP)

St Petersburg, July 16: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is expected to take up with President George W. Bush aspects of the legislation pending in the US Congress to allow civilian nuclear cooperation with India which have caused some “concern” to New Delhi. He is scheduled to meet Bush at 8 in the morning.

The Prime Minister said these “concerns” had already been conveyed to the US government “at all levels”.

India apparently has three concerns: dilution of an assured fuel supply in return for putting the designated civilian faculties under perpetual safeguards (inspections regime), annual certification by the US President of the Indian nuclear activity including its strategic programme; and the denial of fuel reprocessing facility to India.

It is these concerns that the Prime Minister is expected to take up with Bush tomorrow.

Two different versions of the legislation have been passed by the House and Senate committees of the US Congress. The House and the Senate are expected to pass their own version of the legislation before they are finally reconciled into a single waiver authority. Both versions of the legislation have come for criticism in India.

With the monsoon session of Parliament beginning on July 28, the government may have also decided to cover its flanks. The Opposition has already made it clear that the Indo-US nuclear cooperation is likely to figure prominently on its parliamentary agenda.

The leaders of the National Democratic Alliance, including Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani, Jaswant Singh and George Fernandes, have written to the President raising strong objections to the nuclear deal. They have warned that future governments would not be bound by the agreement being signed with the US by this government.

The NDA leaders have claimed that while the Manmohan Singh government was keeping the US Congress fully informed of all developments about the deal, the Indian Parliament was in the dark.

The government has also been criticised for willingly accepting bilaterally with the US almost all the provisions of the discriminatory nuclear non-proliferation treaties which it had refused to sign up to now.

The two legislations also exhort the US to nudge India in certain policy directions globally, which may or may not suit New Delhi’s interests. These range from furthering US policy objectives in Iran, halting and eliminating nuclear weapons in South Asia to working “actively” with the US on the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty and report back to the Congress.

The Senate version of the legislation provides for India not only to sign an inspections agreement with the International Atomic Energy Authority but also with the US, should the IAEA fail to implement the agreement signed by it. India is reluctant to be bound twice over ? once internationally and then bilaterally.

There are objectionable provisions in the proposed US legislation which require annual certification by the US President of the amount of uranium mined in India, the amount which is allocated for India’s weapons programme, the rate of production of material for nuclear weapons as well as the rate of production of nuclear weapons themselves.

Some diplomatic observers do not find this objectionable because they claim that the US President is expected to make annual certification to Congress on a wide variety of issues. India is not bound to provide this information to the US President and this was something internal, they point out.

Besides the issue of nuclear cooperation, Singh said he would also take up with Bush the specific issues of economic cooperation between the two countries. “Our cooperation in the field of economic issues, agriculture, science and technology is moving along the right lines. I see enormous possibilities of strengthening our economic relationship.”