Everyone is focused on how important nuclear energy is going to be in the future and that’s the stated reason why we need the agreements with the United States, the IAEA and the NSG. While this is doubtless important, this is not the only gain and in a near-term perspective other gains may outweigh the nuclear energy part of the deal.

One item that just does not get sufficient attention is the “scientific and technological apartheid” that India has been subject to since 1974. The non-proliferation zealots in the US came up with an absolutely ingenious way to “punish” India and its impertinent leader Indira Gandhi for having had the temerity to explode a bomb which the Chinese had quietly exploded 14 years earlier. The mandarins of Washington, DC came up with a theory that not only should export of nuclear reactors or uranium or heavy water plants or nuclear turbines to India be banned, but innumerable other devices, instruments, machines, designs, drawings, software that had nothing remotely to do with nuclear energy should also be banned. The convoluted logic used was that a switch or a circuit board that may be used in a medical monitor, a large computer, a satellite launcher or a weather-tracking instrument could theoretically have a “dual” use. It could apparently, by some stretch of the imagination, be used in “directly or indirectly” supporting the development of a nuclear device.

Hence all of these arbitrarily classified “dual-use items” were also banned for export to India. Even something as basic as software encryption was considered a sacred item to be kept away from us. This disastrous development has set back Indian science and technology considerably in all sorts of areas — communications, medical technology, advanced computing... you name it.

... contd.