President Barack Obama and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday announced a “breakthrough” after reaching a deal on commerce that appears to shield U.S. companies from liability from nuclear accidents.

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Obama is in India for a three-day visit.

A decade-old deal that would allow the U.S. to provide India with nuclear reactor components and fuel had met obstacles, one of which was about tracking where the material went. Siddharth Varadarajan, Senior Fellow at the Centre for Public Affairs and Critical Theory at Shiv Nadar University, explained the second at the Huffington Post:

Bloomberg News adds:

Danny Roderick, CEO of Westinghouse, which has a tentative deal to build as many as eight reactors in Gujarat, has said that potential litigation stemming from a nuclear accident in the country would be costly. “The way the current law was written, every person in India can sue you” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports Roderick as saying. “That’s the bigger issue — to withstand the legal costs of a billion people trying to sue you.”

According to reporting on Sunday, the sticking point may have been resolved. Reuters reports that the deal reached “could open the door for U.S. companies to build nuclear reactors in India by promising insurance cover to U.S. companies that had shied away from an Indian law placing liability on suppliers in case of an accident.”

The Guardian adds: “After pressure from US diplomats, the Indian government was thought to have agreed a state-backed insurance scheme that would cap the exposure of nuclear suppliers and open the door to billions of dollars of new contracts. India will also allow closer tracking of spent fuel to limit the risk of it falling into terrorist hands.”

And from the Washington Post: “The White House said the agreement was reached through a combination of insurance pools and an assurance that reducing the liability would be within the framework of the 2010 agreement. It will now be up to companies to decide whether or not to go forward with doing business in India. Officials said that, despite the law, the change would not require additional legislation in India.”

Full details on the implementation were not yet revealed, but U.S. Ambassador Richard Verma stated, “We think we came to an understanding of the liability” issue, and said the deal “now opens the door for U.S. and other companies to come forward and help India develop its nuclear, non-carbon-based energy production.”