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Though there are conflicting reports on either side of the Radcliffe Line, the story is primarily being claimed on the basis of a report of a leading American Magazine on International Affairs and Security - FOREIGN POLICY.I shall quote a few excerpts from the article in the December, 2015 edition of this magazine. The magazine claims the construction of a large Military-Nuclear Complex designed to produce Thermonuclear weapons or Hydrogen bombs.India Is Building a Top-Secret Nuclear City to Produce Thermonuclear ...WHERE IS THE CITY BEING CONSTRUCTED?The city is alleged to be under construction at Challakere, Karnataka.“When laborers began excavating pastureland in India’s southern Karnataka state early in 2012, members of the nomadic Lambani tribe were startled. For centuries, the scarlet-robed herbalists and herders had freely crisscrossed the undulating meadows there, known as kavals, and this uprooting of their landscape came without warning or explanation. By autumn, Puttaranga Setty, a wiry groundnut farmer from the village of Kallalli, encountered a barbed-wire fence blocking off a well-used trail. His neighbor, a herder, discovered that the road from this city to a nearby village had been diverted elsewhere. They rang Doddaullarti Karianna, a weaver who sits on one of the village councils that funnel India’s sprawling democracy of 1.25 billion down to the grassroots.Karianna asked officials with India’s state and central governments why the land inhabited by farming and tribal communities was being walled off, but they refused to answer. So Karianna sought legal help from the Environment Support Group, a combative ecological advocacy organization that specializes in fighting illegal encroachment on greenbelt land. But the group also made little progress. Officials warned its lawyers that the prime minister’s office was running the project. “There is no point fighting this, we were told,” Leo Saldanha, a founding member of the advocacy organization, recalled. “You cannot win.””It primarily talks about how the project was started with utter secrecy and there is no information available to the local residents whatsoever.After the India-US Civil Nuclear Deal, India has signed civil nuclear deals with Japan, South Korea, Mongolia, Australia, Russia, Namibia, France, UK, Canada and Argentina. This has virtually freed the indigenous uranium deposits to be used for military use.This indigenous uranium deposits can be used for arming Nuclear tipped Ballistic Missiles and making Nuclear Ballistic and Attack submarines.PROJECT STARTED IN UTTER SECRECYThe magazine further goes on:Western analysts, speaking on condition of anonymity, say, however, that preparation for this enrichment effort has been underway for four years, at a second top-secret site known as the Rare Materials Plant, 160 miles to the south of Challakere, near the city of Mysore. Satellite photos of that facility from 2014 have revealed the existence of a new nuclear enrichment complex that is already feeding India’s weapons program and, some Western analysts maintain, laying the groundwork for a more ambitious hydrogen bomb project. It is effectively a test bed for Challakere, they say, a proving ground for technology and a place where technicians can practice producing the highly enriched uranium the military would need.The Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change approved the Mysore site’s construction in October 2012 as “a project of strategic importance” that would cost nearly $100 million, according to a letter marked “secret,” from the ministry to atomic energy officials that month. Seen by CPI, this letter spells out the ambition to feed new centrifuges with fuel derived from yellowcake — milled uranium ore named after its color — shipped from mines in the village of Jadugoda in India’s north, 1,200 miles away from the Rare Materials Plant, and to draw water from the nearby Krishna Raja Sagar dam.Finding authoritative information about the scope and objectives of these two massive construction projects is not easy. “Even for us, details of the Indian program are always sketchy, and hard facts thin on the ground,” a circumstance that leaves room for misunderstanding, a senior Obama administration official said in Washington.OBAMA ADMINISTRATION AWARE OF THE PROJECT?The magazine claims that it was known at the highest levels of Obama Administration though the exact details are still sketchy.But Gary Samore, who served from 2009 to 2013 as the White House coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction, said there was little misunderstanding. “I believe that India intends to build thermonuclear weapons as part of its strategic deterrent against China,” said Samore. It is unclear, he continued, when India will realize this goal of a larger and more powerful arsenal, but “they will.”A former senior British official who worked on nuclear issues likewise said intelligence analysts on both sides of the Atlantic are “increasingly concerned” about India’s pursuit of thermonuclear weapons and are “actively monitoring” both sites. U.S. officials in Washington said they shared this assessment. “Mysore is being constantly monitored, and we are constantly monitoring progress in Challakere,” a former White House official said.Robert Kelley, who served as the director of the Iraq Action Team at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 1992-1993 and 2001-2005, is a former project leader for nuclear intelligence at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He told CPI that after analyzing the available satellite imagery, as well as studying open source material on both sites, he believes that India is pursuing a larger thermonuclear arsenal. Its development, he warned, “will inevitably usher in a new nuclear arms race” in a volatile region.INDIAN PARLIAMENTARIANS IN DARK AS WELL?The magazine has further claimed that the Indian Parliamentarians and even the Environmental Minister are not in possession of any official knowledge of such projects which they say are carried out in utter secrecy by the PMO and Defense Ministry.LARGE TRACTS OF LAND GIVEN BY STATE GOVERNMENT TO BARCBy May 2009, seven months after Congress ratified the U.S.-India nuclear cooperation deal, the Karnataka state government had secretly leased 4,290 acres adjacent to the villages of Varavu Kaval and Khudapura in the district of Chitradurga to the DRDO and another 1,500 acres to the Indian Institute of Science, a research center that has frequently worked with the DRDO and India’s nuclear industry, documents obtained by lawyers showed.In December 2010, the state government leased a further 573 acres to the Indian Space Research Organisation and the BARC bought 1,810 acres. Councilor Karianna said the villagers were not told at the time about any of these transactions and that the documents, which the advocacy group obtained two years later in 2012, “were stunning. We were being fenced in behind our backs.”The sensitivity of the Challakere project became clearer after the Environment Support Group legal team filed a lawsuit in 2012 at the High Court of Karnataka, demanding a complete accounting of pastureland being seized by the authorities — only to learn from the state land registry that local authorities had granted the Indian army 10,000 acres too, as the future home for a brigade of 2,500 soldiers. The State Reserve Police, an armed force, would receive 350 acres, and 500 acres more had been set aside for a commando training center. The nuclear city would, in short, be ringed by a security perimeter of thousands of military and paramilitary guards.INCREASED CONCERN ABOUT THE PROJECT’S SECRECY AMONGST LOCALSThe locals lost their livelihood. The local authorities proved to be useless. Even NGT passed a ruling against the construction of the nuclear city but was not executed on ground.In July 2013, six years after New Delhi greenlit the plans, an Indian environmental agency, the National Green Tribunal, finally took up the villager’s complaints. It dispatched investigators to the scene and demanded that each government agency disclose its ambitions in detail. The DRDO responded that national security trumped the tribunal and provided no more information; the other government entities simply continued construction.While the IAEA would be kept out, villagers were being hemmed in. By 2013, a public notice was plastered onto an important local shrine warning worshipers it would soon be inaccessible. A popular altar for a local animist ceremony was already out of bounds.“Then the groundwater began to vanish,” Karianna said. The district is semiarid, and local records, still written in ink, show that between 2003 and 2007, droughts had caused the suicides of 101 farmers whose crops failed. By 2013, construction had fenced off a critical man-made reservoir adjacent to Ullarthi. Bore wells dug by the nuclear and military contractors as the construction accelerated siphoned off other water supplies from surrounding villages.Seventeen miles of 15-foot-high walls began to snake around the villagers’ meadows, blocking grazing routes and preventing them from gathering firewood or herbs for medicine. Hundreds rallied to knock holes into the new ramparts. “They were rebuilt in days,” Karianna said, “so we tried again, but this time teams of private security guards had been hired by someone, and they viciously beat my neighbors and friends.”BARC and the DRDO still provided no detailed explanations to anyone on the ground about the scope and purpose of their work, Karianna added. “Our repeated requests, pleadings, representations to all elected members at every level have yielded no hard facts. It feels as if India has rejected us.” Highlighting local discontent, almost all of the villagers ringing the kavals boycotted the impending general election, a rare action since India’s birth as a democracy in 1947. The growing local discontent, and the absence of public comment by the United States or European governments about the massive project, eventually drew the attention of independent nuclear analysts.IS WASHINGTON SECRETLY HANDS IN GLOVE WITH INDIA ON THIS PROJECT?It does seem that Washington not only views India as a major economic partner but also a strategic partner in counterbalancing China. The signing of the Nuclear deal and the lifting of the US Sanctions on India, opened up billions of dollars of Arms trade between India-USA. But USA also looks at India as its strongest possible future ally to counter China on the military front.Thus, it seems that Washington has turned a blind eye at least to this development.CONCLUSION = The report is exhaustive enough suggesting that there is a large scale Military Industrial Complex being built in Karnataka. The satellite pictures do suggest the same. But the exact purpose of such a city could always be argued upon.It will be used as an advanced weapons testing centre in the future. The western powers have a good knowledge of such an area. They have not yet raised any public concerns about it. In fact, the nuclear civil deals with UK, France and Japan were signed much after 2008.