Nuclear Deal

“It is important at this point not to speak as a Member of a political Party, but to speak as an Indian. Everybody in this House, regardless of which party he comes from speaks in the interest of the nation. We are meeting here because there is a serious problem in India and the problem is our energy security. Poverty is directly connected to energy security. Energy effects India’s growth. If we do not secure our energy supply into the future, growth will stop and we will not be able to fight poverty.

The way our nuclear industry is positioned today, it is going to do neither. It is neither going to act as an insurance policy nor is it going to act or have the potential to act as a fundamental source of energy. And, the reason it is not going to do so is because the hands of our scientists, the hands of our establishment are tied; they are tied because they do not have fuel on one hand, and on the other hand they do not have investment and technology. Senior leaders have also established that the way forward is diversification and reliance on more than one source of energy, a balanced portfolio that includes nuclear, hydrocarbon, solar and wind among others. It is not enough to identify a problem and a potential solution. The magic of what Shri Manmohan Singhji is doing is that within the problem, he has identified an opportunity that is significantly larger than the problem itself. The opportunity our Prime Minister has identified is based on a simple fact. It is based on the fact that over the next 30-40 years, two countries are going to use the largest bulk of new energy that comes on line. These countries – China and India – have the ability to define the way the world’s energy moves. Instead of looking at our energy problem as a problem, we start to look at our energy usage as an opportunity. Like a big buyer who goes to any market, we have the ability to shape the global energy industry, and energy is like no other industry in the world. Energy, as I said earlier, is used everywhere, in everything and in every aspect of economic and social life. Energy has destroyed nations and it has built nations. Instead of worrying about how the world will impact us, we start worrying about how we will impact the world.

Many years ago, this country embarked on a path which many people did not believe in. We developed an industry called, IT industry and the telecom industry. Very few people believed that the computer would have anything to do with empowering the poor and with changing the way this country worked. Yet, today all of us together see the impact of the computer. The decision here is not about three per cent energy or seven per cent energy. It is not about India’s usage of nuclear energy. If we look at the big picture here, it is about whether India can become a global power in a type of energy that is going to be very important in the future. We all know the problems caused by hydrocarbons. We know about pollution. Earlier, one of he Members asked me to point out what is the connection between energy and poverty. We know the link between us depending on hydrocarbons and prices in India today. When we think about energy, when we think about nuclear energy, we must think about the poorest in the country. Contrary to what most people believed, when we thought about IT in this country, we were thinking about the poor in this country. It is something that is hard to cross because it is counterintuitive. But one must not underestimate the connections between industry, between energy and between the poor. It is important to realize that this country is brimming with confidence and brimming with self-belief. Another point we must never forget when we take decisions as leaders in this country is that we have to believe in that, in our people and we have to have confidence in what we are capable of doing. We have to have confidence in what they are doing. What matters is that we start working together and we together try to solve the problems of this country. “