Thaindian News

New Delhi, June 16 (IANS) The nuclear liability bill introduced in parliament is meant to safeguard the interests of the US companies who will supply reactors to India, Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) general secretary Prakash Karat says.
“The Congress-led government has obliged the US by bringing this shocking piece of legislation which makes it near impossible to hold foreign suppliers of nuclear reactors to account in the case of an accident.”

In the event of a nuclear accident, they are to be exempt from any liability to pay compensation for the damages caused, Karat said in the latest issue of the party organ ‘People’s Democracy’.

“What Westinghouse and General Electric want is that even the limited liability which accrued to Union Carbide in the case of Bhopal ($470 million as per the settlement approved by the Supreme Court) should not fall on them,” the CPI-M leader said.

Citing the timing of the first sitting of the standing committee of parliament to examine the nuclear liability bill, Karat said: “This is a bill which was denounced by the CPI-M when it was in the stage of being drafted within the government.”

“This is a legislation being brought to fulfill a commitment made by the UPA government when it entered into the India-US nuclear deal,” he added.

Stating that the the Bhopal verdict has a direct relevance to the nuclear liability bill, Karat said “no more Bhopals and Warren Andersons should recur.”

“If there are lessons to be learnt from the tragic episode of Bhopal, it is that there should be strict laws which will assign civil liability and ensure that criminal liability is also pinned down.”

“There can be no compromise with the lives and safety of the Indian people in order to appease the commercial interests and profits of foreign and Indian big business.

“The first step towards ensuring this will be to scrap the civil nuclear liability bill,” Karat said.