India's attitude to nuclear power

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33740, 13 January 1975, Page 10

India 's attitude to nuclear power

(By

DEREK ROUND,

HONG KONG, Januarj’ 9.

India believed that nuclear power was as fundamental to the second industrial revolution as steam power was to the first, the out-going United States Ambassador to India (Mr Daniel Patrick Moynihan) said.

“India feels it missed the first industrial revolution—it doesn’t propose to miss the second,” he said. Mr Moynihan, a former Cabinet minister who has been Ambassador in New Delhi for the last two years, was speaking at a Foreign Correspondents’ Club luncheon. The Indian Government was very conscious that nuclear power fundamentally marked a break in the world’s technological development, he said.

Nuclear research was nothing new to Indians and Indian scientists had worked with the New Zealand-born

N.Z.P.A. staff correspondent.)

Lord Rutherford at Cambridge.

“They not only have the nuclear power, they need it,” Mr Moynihan declared. “That is fundamentally what is behind their programme.” Mr Moynihan said that it was easy to underestimate India in world affairs.

“It’s not an undeveloped country,” he added. “It’s simply a poor country.” Describing India’s agricultural potential as “staggering,” Mr Moynihan said: “They could feed the world.” But India had been forced to import food every year since its independence and he saw no prospect of this changing in the near future. The necessary extensive development of irrigation projects would take seven years and the population was going up all the time. Mr Moynihan said that the increase in oil prices had been a devastating blow to Indian agriculture which depended on oil-fuelled pumps for most of its irrigation water.