Wednesday, June 21 2006 10:02 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Washington: The process of getting Congressional approval for the US-India nuclear deal gets underway next week with the supporting bill coming up for crucial review before a panel of the lower house on June 27.

No date has been set as yet for 'mark-up' or review of the text of a similar bill in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but the deal has won critical support from the heads of both panels indicating that the Bush administration is close to building a consensus on the deal in Congress.

The senate panel chairman Dick Lugar indicatted as much when he joined hi counterpart in the House of Representatives, Henry Hyde, in commending the agreement last week and publicly announcing that the two houses are satisfactorily 'working through language that would guide our policy toward India.'

While Hyde said he is willing to push the bill through, Lugar warned that a Congressional rejection of the agreement or an open-ended delay -risks wasting a critical opportunity to begin to expand beyond our Cold War alliance structures to include dynamic nations with whom our interests are converging.

An open meeting of the House of Representatives Committee on International Relations has been called on June 27 for the purpose of marking up a bill 'to authorise the President to waive the application of certain requirements under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 with respect to India.'

The bill introduced in the house on March 16, 2006 by the panel chairman Hyde himself with representative Tom Lantos would authorise the president to waive the application of some provisions to 'proposed agreement for (nuclear) cooperation with India' provided he determines that New Delhi has complied with a set of seven actions.

The president will have to report to the foreign relations committees of the two houses the basis for his determination and it would become ineffective if the President determines that India has detonated a nuclear explosive device after the Act is enacted.