Thursday, April 20 2006 10:28 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Washington: The formalisation of the Indo-US civilian nuclear energy agreement will facilitate greater role for the private sector in the form of technology sourcing and may even lead to the opening up of the key sector to foreign investment, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia has said.

"This opens up the possibility for opening it up to the private sector and if it is opened up to the private sector, obviously technology sourcing is determined by the private sector, not by us (government) if it is opened up to the private sector, then why shouldn't it be opened up to foreign investment also?," Ahluwalia said here yesterday during a luncheon discussion at the American Enterprise Institute.

"I think that will be something very legitimate and we would have to look at it at that time. We have not addressed that issue. We don't have a declared policy at the moment but they are issues that we certainly have to consider.

"My personal view is that if that agreement goes through, that is certainly an initiative we have to consider; and it also becomes possible to subject nuclear plants to an element of competition," he said.

Ahluwalia said opening up of the civilian nuclear sector to private investment would help the government use public resources for facilitating research in the field.

"I think it raises the question that if it is opened up, then given the scarcity of public resources available, it is far more useful for us (government) to use all our public resources to support the research area rather than just setting up plain vanilla nuclear plants based on uranium," he said.