Yoginder K. Alagh I have always functioned in an environment of intense contestations. At Jaipur in the Nehru era, my teachers were radical. In America during my college days, the economists who taught me, like Lawrence Klein and Daniel Thorner, had been hounded by McCarthy. But I taught at Wharton and at Swarthmore where students were collecting medicines for the Vietnamese. And so it went on at the Planning Commission, JNU and in my academic job in Ahmedabad, famous for Nav Nirman, Narmada and Godhra and of course for growing very fast unequally. The fashionable political economist, Barrington Moore, also wrote a slim book on the limits of reason, based on his conversations with two colleagues, preparing us for The Argumentative Indian. At JNU, my students would push me to the brink, and I would tell myself, there must be something to what they are saying. The idealism of youth would fashion the future and the Alagh law is that the next generation is smarter than mine. The nuclear deal is so important that a last attempt is called for. There are two arguments against it. The first is that it is not critical for energy self-reliance and, in fact, makes the country more dependent. The second is that nuclear energy is expensive. The first argument is that the deal reduces India's options. Recognising that the 123 aspect is a domestic US requirement, the argument is that India will become vulnerable to politically determined uranium supplies from abroad, as compared to, one supposes, going it alone. The point that trade in uranium is perhaps more vulnerable to control by other countries as compared to the oil cartels is true, but that is a fact of life and the deal does not make us worse off either in terms of global opportunities or in pursuit of the limited domestic uranium options we have. More important, the thorium-based nuclear energy route, which has been the holy grail for completing the energy cycle with domestic fuel resources, does need the deal to hasten it. It is puzzling that some analysts in India ignore or belittle this. It is true that we have to go through the fast breeder reactor route to reach this objective. I was surprised when the Integrated Energy Policy Report of the Planning Commission did not mention that we have our own experimental working reactor based on the thorium route at Kalpakkam and that we are the only country in the world that has it. I thought this was a slip, but when I mentioned it at a national meeting, the existence of the reactor was controverted. It was left to Sanjaya Baru, advisor to the prime minister, who was there to clarify that the reactor is very much there; but of course I should not be emotional about it, whatever that means. The thorium route is a process and it needs to be emphasised that we are on it. Just as in the '70s the work of the Electronics Commission chaired by Professor M.G.K. Menon or the CSIR lab at Pilani was important to India's satellites and software outsourcing, the thorium achievements have to be built upon for completing the nuclear fuel cycle. Incidentally, the reactor beginning with 40 MW is now over 100 MW. The nuclear deal will help us in this, since membership to the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership for managing climate change will be a major way of accelerating the process. To be fair to the critics, there has not been any non-trivial clarification on the long-term aspect of the deal officially. The question of nuclear energy options being more expensive is just wrong. We have known for long that, far from the coal hinterland, when the hydel option is limited, nuclear power is economical if transmission costs are accounted for; and this is most certainly true at present crude and gas costs. The Planning Commission's Integrated Energy Policy report makes this point again and no one has produced any counterfactual argument. Also, there is the point that Placid Rodriguez, the builder of our fast breeder reactors and the experimental thorium reactor, makes. He refers to a conversation when I had told him that we learn through experiments, as I had discovered in pricing an earlier nuclear boiler. The cost of the eighth assembly was half of the first one and Rodriguez, in an interesting lecture, shows how the fast breeder reactors will compete. Long-term goals are not for the faint-hearted, but India simply cannot opt out. The writer, a former Union minister, is chairman, Institute of Rural Mangement, Anand yalagh@gmail.com