WASHINGTON: Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar on Tuesday said that India is looking forward to the acceptance of application by the club of 48-country Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).
“We are looking forward to the acceptance of our application to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group. This matter would be coming up for the discussion at the end of this month in South Korea. The U.S. has been supportive of this process for some time now. So, that too was something which was discussed at some length and we count of U.S. support in that regard and I would say that the U.S. was very positive in their approach on this issue, ” he said .
Briefing the media on bilateral meeting held between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and U.S. President Barack Obama earlier in the day, the Foreign Secretary said a lot of discussion on energy, clean energy, climate change related issues were discussed.
“On the clean energy there was fair amount of time spent both in the run-up to the summit and even in the discussions today about how to finance it. There is recognition today that India has taken some very big steps towards achieving its goal of achieving 175 giga watts of renewable of which 100 would be solar and there was appreciation of the international solar alliance launched on the sidelines on the Paris Summit, ” he said.
The foreign secretary on the Nuclear Liability issue said ,“One important development that they both recognised was the progress that had been made in the nuclear side and as you all know we have addressed the Nuclear Liability issue. Now we are in a position to start the preparatory work on site in India for 6 AP1000 Westinghouse reactors. Now this is still work in progress.”
“We are looking at, we are having discussion even if we speak with the US Exim bank for the financing package. But overall there was sense that a big sense forward had been taken, a very decisive step forward had been taken in this regard and this was welcomed by both leaders, ” he added.
Talking about the three funds which include the US-India clean energy finance initiative, he said the expectation is that it would mobilize the funds to really provide clean and renewable electricity to a million households in India by 2020.
“There is also India- US catalytic solar finance programme which again is looking at mobilising a very large amount from the private sector on solar projects and there was discussion on public-private research efforts in smart grid and grid storage,” he added.
He said that the U.S. welcomed India’s imminent entry into the Missile Technology Control Regime.
“I think, we heard for the U.S. side expressions of welcome of our imminent entry into the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) which is the other export control regime which has been under discussion for some time, ” he said.