India's Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran spoke in London on Thursday after handing over to US Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns a draft of a proposed bilateral agreement on civil nuclear cooperation.

Burns "gave me an account of where it stands (in the US Congress). There is still work to be done," Saran told reporters, adding however that the "outlook was positive and encouraging".

"The sum total is that we can move ahead on the nuclear deal," he said.

The agreement documents the deal struck in March during a visit to India by US President George W. Bush giving New Delhi access to US nuclear energy technology for the first time in three decades.

However the deal has sparked complaints in Washington that US negotiators gave away too much.

The accord -- awaiting a green light from the US Congress -- will allow India, which has not signed the nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), access to long-denied nuclear technology.

In return, New Delhi has agreed to place a majority of its atomic reactors under international safeguards.

Saran said Burns told him Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was working to ensure the deal goes through Congress.

US legislators say they want to first have a look at a set of safeguards under which India and the United States would implement the nuclear agreement as well as the bilateral agreement to encompass all key ingredients of the deal.

The safeguards are still being negotiated between India and the global atomic watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

IAEA chief Mohammad ElBaradei met Rice in Washington on Thursday and declared the nuclear deal a "win-win" agreement, the Press Trust of India reported.

Baradei said he wanted to ensure India became a partner in non-proliferation.

"To me, this is a win-win agreement and I hope it will be also for Congress," he said.

"We also are trying to look to the big picture in making sure that we have innovative measures to ensure that sensitive proliferation technology, like enrichment or reprocessing is contained."

Rice agreed, saying: "We need to broaden our concept of non-proliferation regime in order to deal with anomalies like the Indian situation."

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