Krishna hails Australian move to sell uranium to India

"We understand that Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard proposes to seek a change in the ruling Labour Party's policy on sale of uranium to India in recognition of our energy needs, the impeccable record of our non-proliferation treaty (NPT) accord and strategic partnership on this," Krishna told reporters here Tuesday.

Welcoming this very important initiative, Krishna said India attached great importance to its relations with Australia, which are growing across the board.

"Energy is one of the key areas of our bilateral cooperation," Krishna said on the margins of the 11th council of ministers of the Indian Ocean Rim Association of Regional Cooperation (IOR-ARC), which got underway here.

"It is time for (ruling) Labor to modernise our platform and enable us to strengthen our connection with dynamic, democratic India," Gillard said in an article published in The Age newspaper Tuesday.

Gillard, who met Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the G20 summit at Cannes, and a number of her senior party colleagues, has been urging the lifting of the ban on uranium exports to India as the South Asian country has shown remarkable nuclear compliance.

"We will not sell India uranium for peaceful purposes - though Canada is preparing to - while policy allows us to export it to countries such as China, Japan and the United States," Gillard wrote in her The Age article Tuesday.

She, however, added that "we must, of course, expect of India the same standards we do of all countries for uranium export".