US-India Nuclear Deal: US Hopes For Commercial Civil Agreement By 2017

The United States and India have an agreement for peaceful use of nuclear resources since 2008 but the U.S. has yet to gain financially from the deal. However, the announcement for a new nuclear plant to be set up in India, hopefully later this year, could change that.

The U.S. is hopeful that Pennsylvania company Westinghouse Electric Corporation will come up with a deal that is acceptable to both the U.S. and Indian governments. The deal, if it goes through, would mark the first financial agreement under the civil nuclear partnership between the two countries. President Barack Obama and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have resolved some lingering issues in the actual agreement and the project is likely to be announced by July 2017.

"What remains of the civil nuclear agreement is the actual commercial deal to be negotiated and the financing to be negotiated. That I think is moving forward. It has been our hope that the two governments, the two leaders when they last met said that they are hopeful that they would be at a point where a commercial deal and financing be announced by the summer of 2017. I am hopeful that that would continue to be the case and we would continue to work through those issues," Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Nisha Desai Biswal reportedly said to Press Trust of India (PTI) on Monday.

Biswal also told PTI: "During the Bush Administration, the civil-nuclear agreements negotiated was a watershed moment because it set the two countries on a path that India and U.S. are so far along today."

But certain important issues were left unresolved at the time, citing which Biswal added: "What I think, President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Narendra Modi have been able to do is resolve those residual blocks that were there on the actual agreement itself."

The Nuclear Power Corporation of India and Westinghouse had signed an agreement in June 2016 to jointly begin preparatory work on six nuclear reactors. The two sides are working toward finalizing the contractual arrangements by June 2017, and engineering and site design work will begin immediately.