That’s the indication from Washington to a tense New Delhi as a vote this week is necessary to ensure that the entire process is completed before the newly elected Congress takes over after elections in November. Otherwise, it will have to start from scratch.

Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran, the chief interlocutor on the n-deal, is in New York with Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee at the UN General Assembly. He will meet US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns on the margins of the UNGA. It’s learnt that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been in touch with the Senate leadership, including Majority leader Bill Frist, to schedule a vote this session.

While this Congress will meet again in November, a vote then would mean hardly any time for reconciliation of the Bill with the one that has been passed in the House of Representatives.

A vote this week will give time — the whole of October — for the Reconciliation Committee to address the portions with which India has problems and arrive at a common version of the Bill that could be put through an “up and down” vote in both chambers of the Congress.

The problem for India is that US Congressional rules don’t allow for any carry forward to the newly elected Congress.

If a Bill is not fully passed by both chambers of the Congress and sent to the President for approval, it lapses and the process will have to begin from scratch. This would mean going back to the respective committees in both chambers and dealing with the new composition of the House of Representatives.

Part of the problem is that the US Additional Protocol, a matter that has nothing to do with the n-deal, had been tagged to the Indian legislation. Some Senators have demanded that this be debated separately.

In New Delhi, the understanding is that once the reconciliation process begins in Washington, negotiations on the bilateral agreement can be hastened. Similar efforts will be made on the India-specific safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Ideally, these will all be finalised simultaneously by mid-November.

This would time well with the “lame duck” session of this Congress in November. In this session, up and down vote on both the Bill and the bilateral agreement can be slated. An up and down vote means no amendments can be moved, just a plain vote which usually doesn’t take much time.

But for this tight schedule to fall in place, sources said, it is vital that Senate votes soon. Friday may just be right.