JOIN USNuclear deal on cards as Sirisena comes calling
Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena’s maiden visit to India may see New Delhi and Colombo moving towards a civil nuclear cooperation agreement to take bilateral ties to a new height.
Sirisena, who took over as the new President of Sri Lanka last month after defeating Mahinda Rajapaksa, will arrive in New Delhi on Sunday. He is scheduled to hold talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi the next day. A comprehensive India-Sri Lanka nuclear cooperation agreement is expected to be among the outcomes of the meeting.
New Delhi may also offer Colombo assistance of over $250 million to build 20,000 houses for plantation workers—mostly Tamils with roots in India—as well as to upgrade and repair 30,000 existing houses across tea and rubber estates in southern Sri Lanka.
New Delhi is engaged in building houses for ethnic Tamils displaced due to conflict in the Northern Province of Sri Lanka. But the package Modi is set to offer Sirisena is likely to fund the first major project for “Indian Tamils”—descendants of workers British planters had taken from India in 19th and 20th centuries to work in plantations in Sri Lanka's southern districts.
New Delhi was quick to reach out to the new President after his election, as it expects Sirisena, unlike Rajapaksa, to not allow China to use the island nation to add to the strategic assets it has been building encircling India. As Sirisena chose New Delhi as his first overseas destination after taking over, the Modi government is expecting “substantive talks and outcomes in terms of agreements, frameworks and announcements” across a range of areas for prospective bilateral cooperation.
Sources, however, told Deccan Herald that both India and Sri Lanka were keen to move fast on the proposed nuclear cooperation agreement.
Offers from Pakistan and China to help Sri Lanka build nuclear reactors had prompted a jittery New Delhi to launch consultations with Colombo in 2012 for “a comprehensive agreement on bilateral civil nuclear cooperation”. Indian and Sri Lankan officials held two more rounds of talks in 2014.
The scope of the proposed agreement is likely to include New Delhi helping build small nuclear power plants in Sri Lanka using Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors indigenously developed in India, in addition to training officials on nuclear safety and response to nuclear accidents.
The proposed deal is likely to provide for bilateral cooperation between India and Sri Lanka for research and development works exploring power generation using thorium.
Indian nuclear scientists may help their Sri Lankan colleagues conduct feasibility studies on use of thorium deposits, found in abundance along the southern coastal belt of the island nation, to generate atomic power, sources added.
If New Delhi and Colombo ink the deal, it will be India's first nuclear cooperation agreement with any of its neighbours.