One question about the continuing drama and deepening political crisis over the Indo-US nuclear deal fills me with agony: Americans know what they want out of this agreement, but do we?

The UPA government is fooling the nation by presenting the deal as a panacea for India’s chronic power scarcity. “Opponents of the deal are enemies of India’s development,” thundered Sonia Gandhi at a rally in Haryana. True, her party did a quick U-turn by putting out a rather creative interpretation on her combative remark — saying it was “Haryana-specific”! But rest assured that it will revive the “enemies of development” theme, now that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, with the apparent backing of the only person who wields real authority in the UPA coalition, has done yet another U-turn.

But will the deal really answer the ‘B’ part of the BSP (bijlee, sadak, paani) needs of our people? For an answer, turn to the ‘Integrated Energy Policy’ report of the Planning Commission’s expert committee in August 2006. It projects 11 different fuel-mix scenarios up to 2031-32 for achieving eight per cent annual GDP growth rate.

In none of these scenarios do we see the slightest hint of the “nuclear renaissance” that the prime minister has been so grandiloquently promising. The report says: “Even if a 20-fold increase takes place in India’s nuclear power capacity by 2031-32, the contribution of nuclear energy to India’s energy mix is, at best, expected to be 4-6.4 per cent.” This, even in the most “optimistic scenario” of supply of imported nuclear fuel, made possible through the deal. Remember that Dr Anil Kakodkar, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, was a member of this expert committee.

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