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NEW DELHI: India's government Wednesday celebrated a victory it said would help bring millions out of poverty, after winning a vote that clears the way for a controversial nuclear deal with the United States.
After two days of often chaotic debate, the Congress-led coalition won the confidence vote in parliament by 275 MPs to 256 from the mainly left-wing and Hindu opposition.
Singh needed just a simple majority to keep his vision of modernising India intact and see through the last year of his mandate.
Had he failed, the world's largest democracy would have headed into early elections, with his opponents emboldened.
"This has sent an important message to the world that India is ready to take its rightful place in the committee of nations," Singh said after the vote.
Energy-hungry India, he said, was now free to "operate on the frontiers of modern science and technology" by emerging from three decades of international sanctions blocking its access to nuclear fuel.
The agreement, unveiled in 2005, will allow the United States to sell nuclear plants and related technology to India once it has separated its civil and military programmes and accepted a certain level of UN inspections.
"It is all about widening our development options, promoting energy security in a manner which will not hurt our precious environment and which will not contribute to pollution and global warming," Singh said.
Supplies of nuclear fuel and modern technology could bring some relief for India, blighted by dilapidated infrastructure.
The national grid cannot keep pace with increased ownership of air conditioners, and power cuts are frequent - with businesses large and small forced to shell out large amounts of money for power back-up solutions.
This, the prime minister argued, has been holding the country back from reaching the kind of double-digit growth needed to lift hundreds of millions of people out of "chronic poverty, ignorance and disease."
"A basic requirement for achieving this order of growth is the availability of energy," said Singh, whose government is struggling to sustain heavy fuel subsidies in the face of soaring crude prices.
The nuclear deal was earlier this month submitted to the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency for approval and is expected to be passed by its 35-member board in the coming weeks.
India must also get approval from the 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Group that regulates nuclear fuel and technology trade, and finally from the US Congress.
Washington has urged India to move fast before November's US presidential elections.
"There aren't that many days left where Congress is going to be in session," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said, adding that enough US lawmakers backed the agreement to secure its ratification.
The US Chamber of Commerce says the pact could give American businesses up to US$100 billion of business. Russia and France are also lining up to sign similar cooperation deals with India.
India's left-wing and communists, who sparked the vote by withdrawing their support to the government over the pact, had argued that New Delhi was trading its cherished neutrality for a subservient relationship with Washington.
Along with the main opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), they said international inspections would also harm the development of India's nuclear weapons programme.
In a last-ditch attempt to bring down the government, three BJP lawmakers waved bundles of cash worth US$715,000 dollars that they said they had been paid for their votes.
"Ultimately we are the gainers, and we will win the next general election," due by May 2009 at the latest, senior BJP official Vijay Kumar Malhotra told AFP.
Officials in parliament said speaker Somnath Chatterjee had called in New Delhi's police chief to investigate the bribery claims. The speaker also said the corruption furore meant it was a "sad day in the history of parliament."
- AFP/yb
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