As lawmakers waited for the White House to provide details of the deal, Bush on Friday defended the accord from charges it weakens safeguards against the spread of nuclear weapons in the age of the war on terrorism.

"India has been an excellent partner in nonproliferation over the past decades," the US president said during a roundtable with young entrepreneurs in Hyderabad, India.

"Therefore, I can tell the American people that this is an important agreement to help deal with the proliferation issue," said Bush, who made the agreement the centerpiece of his maiden visit to India.

Some influential lawmakers, while praising warmer US-India ties, have taken a wait-and-see approach to the deal, which must get through the Senate and House of Representatives as well as the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).

Senate Foreign Relations Comittee Chairman Richard Lugar, to whom Bush's Republicans often defer on international affairs, said through a spokesman that he "looked forward to learning the details of the progress made on the nuclear power agreement with India and getting draft legislation" from the White House.

That will decide which committees, in addition to Lugar's and the House International Relations Committee, will take up the deal and could make changes that may send US negotiators back to talks with their Indian counterparts.

Republican Henry Hyde, Lugar's counterpart in the House, said that his panel will "thoroughly examine" the deal, which comes as lawmakers of both major US parties seek to polish their national security credentials ahead of November legislative elections.

Under the agreement, New Delhi has agreed to separate its civilian and nuclear facilities and put 14 of its 22 nuclear reactors under international inspections.

The nuclear fuel supply from the United States is key for the civilian reactors that India would build in the future to produce energy to power its rapidly growing economy.

Critics have zeroed in on a provision giving India leeway to declare so-called fast-breeder nuclear reactors untouchable by international inspection. Such reactors can be critical to developing nuclear weapons.

And some have said the agreement, which effectively ends India's status as a nuclear pariah even though it has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), will harm efforts to curb the spread of atomic weapons.

"With one simple move the president has blown a hole in the nuclear rules that the entire world has been playing by," said Representative Edward Markey, co-chair of the Bipartisan Task Force on Nonproliferation and senior Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Bush "has now pushed over a nuclear domino that falls against 187 other nations -- all signers of the Nonproliferation Treaty -- to review why they should honour a document which the nuclear superpowers no longer respect," he said in a statement.