NEW DELHI: The top US negotiator in a landmark deal to allow civilian nuclear technology sales to India arrives in New Delhi this week to try and resolve nagging differences over the pact, officials said on Monday.
“Nicholas Burns is scheduled to arrive in India on May 31” for talks with Indian Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon, a source from the US embassy in New Delhi said, adding the talks would continue until June 1.
US Undersecretary of State Burns will meet Indian officials to hammer out language to implement the deal which was agreed on during a visit by President George W. Bush to India last year. The deal aims to reverse three decades of US sanctions on nuclear trade with India, even though New Delhi has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and tested nuclear weapons in 1998.
Efforts to agree on the fine print of implementing the pact have yet to be ironed out.
Earlier this month Burns told the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank in Washington, that both sides “were 90 per cent of the way there”.—AFP
