Indian students attending university in Australia are feeling confident and secure despite a massive drop in enrolments, India's external affairs minister says.
And the minister, SM Krishna, says the Asian subcontinent's desire for clean energy can only be achieved by using uranium.
Mr Krishna was in Melbourne with Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd following the annual Foreign Ministers' Framework Dialogue for talks on issues that ranged from the Indian Ocean, education, science and regional co-operation.
The Indian minister said his previous visit to Australia in 2009 had been plagued by "anguish and worry" caused by a series of high-profile attacks on students from his country. "But on this visit that worry is missing, that anguish has disappeared," Mr Krishna told reporters on Thursday.
Mr Krishna commended the steps initiated by Australia to address Indian students' safety concerns.
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"Indian students feel quite secure and feel quite confident, and they feel that can pursue their studies without any anxiety," he said. Mr Krishna disputed the widely reported figure of an 80 per cent drop in enrolments by Indian students in Australia since the attacks, saying his understanding was that enrolments had dropped by 40 per cent.
The minister said he had raised the question of Australia's supply of uranium to India in the context of climate change.
He said India's aim for clean energy could only be met by the use of nuclear power.
"And if we have to have nuclear energy then it's certain we need uranium," he said. Mr Krishna emphasised that the need to use uranium was not confined to India and that other nations had opted for nuclear power.
"It is not India-centric, it is not India-specific across the world (who) have taken the decision," he said.
Labor refuses to sell uranium to India because it has not signed the United Nations Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Mr Rudd said India, Australia's fifth-largest trading partner, is a commercially important partnership between both countries and the two democracies share "many fundamental commonalities".
