"Deal" Wins

Letter to the Editor Asian Voice

Published on 2 August 2008 on Page 5.

by Nagin Khajuria

‘Deal’ wins

I am really glad that the United Progress Alliance under Manmohan Singh has won over the Bhartiya Janata Party and Communist Party Alliance to get the Indo-US Nuclear Accord ratified by the Indian Parliament.

Originally I was against this Accord. On reflection, I am now in favour. My reasons are as follows:

• India has never been part of the Club of powerful nations. It can now use its influence by being an insider rather than an outsider.

• There are 8 to 9 countries that have nuclear weapons. Other 20 nations could develop such weapons if they wanted to. By agreeing to have India’s nuclear facilities to be inspected by the international community, India is effectively discouraging nuclear weapons proliferation, which is a good thing.

• India knows the damage it can inflict upon itself if it does not realise that there will always be nations who will try to break it by the well known method of divide and rule. Recent bombings in Ahmadabad and Banglore remind us of that. May be we should have a few states in India where meat is prohibited a) to encourage other nations to follow India and b) to discourage violence to animals in addition to humans.

• That is ALSO why the inquiry into vote rigging, bribery of MPs, bullying tactics, should be dropped otherwise those who may have tried to divide and rule India may have succeed sooner than later. 

• The bribery charges against MPs in this voting reminds me of the joke that when other countries complained to God why He had bestowed so much upon India, God responded and told them: “Do not worry; I shall put more corrupt people there.”

• All parties should now stand united about this historic decision and make the most it by expanding its power generation capacity through nuclear reactors.

• The important aspect they should remember is health and safety. The explosion in Chernobyl story is not over yet. Currently they are building a huge aircraft hanger like construction costing 800 million dollars to cover reactor number 4 remains that had exploded 20 years ago. No 1, 2 and 3 were decommissioned in year 2000.

• India must now also concentrate on all other sources of power generation.

• It should get on with power generation through more advanced capture of biomass (plant and animal waste).

• Sea based and lands based wind farms can generate a fair amount of electric power. In Denmark, wind generates about 20% of all its electricity.

• Panels covered with photovoltaic cell capture the sun at a solar park near Leipzig, Germany. With 33,500 panels, it is one of the planet’s largest arrays.

• Solar energy costs have gone down a lot over the past 30 years and further reductions are likely. Some countries have laws requiring new building to have solar energy. 

• When we drove extensively in Andalucía, Spain, a couple of years ago, we so hundreds of wind mills generating electricity for people and/or mass production of tomatoes in hundreds of small green houses, one after another for miles and miles.

• Readers of Asian Voice need to study three very interesting articles I recently came across that argue some of the above points in more depth that I can do here. 

• “Powering the Future: where on earth our energy-hungry society can turn to replace oil, coal, and natural gas? By Michael Parfit; and

• “Living with the Bomb: it has been 60 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today nuclear weapons stoke nations’ dreams of power and give their citizens nightmares” by Richard Rhodes; (National Geographic August 2005)

• “Inside Chernobyl plus Nuclear Power Reconsidered” by Richard Stone (National Geographic April 2006).

• They all make a lot of sense and we should learn from them.

Nagin Khajuria, FCCA

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