End user,climate change: No compromise,says PM

“Any verification has to follow a request,it has to be on a mutually acceptable date and at a mutually acceptable venue. There is no provision for on-site inspections or granting of access to any military site or sensitive areas,” said Singh.

“There is no provision for any unilateral action by the US side with regard to inspection or related matters. India has the sovereign right to jointly decide,including through joint consultations,the verification procedure,” he said.

The End User Monitoring Agreement,signed during US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to the country,has invited sharp criticism from the Opposition and Left parties who described it as a compromise with national security.

The PM,however,said such an agreement was not new and New Delhi had entered into similar agreements with the US since the late 1990s for the import of high-technology equipment. “These (earlier such deals with US) were negotiated before this agreement in each case by successive governments of India. The government has only accepted those arrangements which are fully in consonance with our sovereignty and dignity. What we have now agreed with the US is a generic formulation which will apply to future such supplies that India chooses to undertake,” he said.

On the agreement over climate change at the MEF in Italy — where India signed a declaration that committed the member countries to strive for halting the rise in global temperature to within 2 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels — Singh said it was “entirely in line with our stated position on global warming”.

He said an argument that it would oblige India to accept emission reduction targets was a “one sided and misleading interpretation” of the declaration,though he acknowledged that this was the first time that India had accepted a reference to 2 degrees Celsius as a possible threshold guiding global action. “Drawing attention to the seriousness of global warming does not automatically translate into a compulsion on the part of India or other developing countries represented in the Major Economies Forum to accept emission reduction obligations,” he said.