Dr. Jitendra Singh
When the monsoon first touches the Deccan, a million tiny rivulets knit themselves into rivers. It is not a thunderclap that turns water into force; it is patient joining-stream to stream, village to village-until the flow is confident enough to light a city. India’s journey with the atom has felt like that: quiet channels of science converging over decades, now gathering into a river strong enough to power a data centre at midnight, sterilise a meal in the afternoon, and help a clinician save a child by evening.
With the introduction of the SHANTI Bill-the Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India Bill, 2025-we are shaping the riverbed so that this flow reaches every home, industry and institution that needs dependable, clean energy and life enhancing applications.
To understand why this moment matters, we must begin with the context. Before 2014, India’s nuclear framework was anchored in two separate statutes: the Atomic Energy Act, 1962, which guided development and control, and the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, 2010, which provided a no fault compensation regime. Each served its time; each also reflected an era when nuclear capability was primarily a sovereign effort, with very limited pathways for the broader ecosystem-manufacturing, finance, insurance, startups, and advanced research-to participate. SHANTI draws these strands together, repealing both laws and replacing them with a single, modern architecture-in one stroke conferring statutory status on our regulator, the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), defining roles and responsibilities with clarity, and opening responsible avenues for public private participation while reserving sensitive functions to the Government.
Comparison tells us how far the river has widened. In the past decade India has achieved self reliance across the nuclear fuel cycle and carried the programme responsibly; now we are ready to scale-towards a national goal of 100 gigawatt (GW) nuclear capacity by 2047, adding reliable baseload power to support AI, quantum computing, indigenous semiconductor fabrication, and large scale data research. The Bill codifies this readiness: it creates a unified licensing and safety authorisation regime; it sets graded liability for operators- Rs 3,000 crore for the largest reactors, down to Rs 100 crore for smaller reactors and fuel cycle facilities-so innovation such as small reactors and small modular reactors (SMRs) can proceed with proportionate safeguards. It also establishes a Nuclear Liability Fund for situations where compensation exceeds the operator’s cap, and provides recourse to the international Convention on Supplementary Compensation-because compassion must be as scalable as technology.
Change, in the most meaningful sense, is what the ordinary citizen can feel. In healthcare, nuclear medicine has moved from promise to practice: targeted therapies for childhood blood cancers and prostate malignancies now flow from centres such as Tata Memorial, turning isotopes into instruments of healing. We have made headway in a decade; we are liberalising research pathways so that capable private institutes can add their ingenuity to national capacity. In food and agriculture, radiation technologies already help preserve produce, extend shelf life, and ensure safety; SHANTI recognises radiation facilities and generating equipment, bringing clarity and security to their everyday use-whether in a hospital’s therapy wing or a factory’s quality line.
Let me explain some of the terms we will live with. A “nuclear incident” is an occurrence (or related series) that causes nuclear damage-or, despite reasonable preventive steps, poses a grave, imminent risk of doing so. “Nuclear damage” is broader than before: it includes loss of life or injury (including long term health impact), loss or damage to property, environmental restoration costs, loss of income linked to environmental use, and the costs of preventive and mitigation measures. A “safety authorisation” is written permission from the AERB; it is what ensures that radiation equipment, radioisotopes, and facilities that expose individuals to ionising radiation are designed, sited, operated and decommissioned under standards that put safety first-always.
Safety is not a slogan; it is a discipline with numbers and routines. India’s operating plants are inspected every three months during construction and every six months in operation; licences are renewed every five years; the International Atomic Energy Agency benchmarks our parameters, and the AERB’s statutory status now gives it sharper teeth. Radiation is measured in microsieverts: the annual public limit is 1,000 µSv, while emissions at our stations are a tiny fraction-for instance, Koodankulam’s is around 0.002 of that unit, Tarapur around 0.2-evidence that design and operation keep doses well below thresholds. Seismic wisdom is built in: eastern and western coastal sites are sited far from high risk zones-hundreds to over a thousand kilometres away-because geography, too, must be engineered into safety.
What changes, then, in the citizen’s daily life? First, power you can trust-24×7, low carbon, and not hostage to the weather. When a textile cluster adds an SMR to its energy mix, it stabilises looms and livelihoods; when a district hospital relies on uninterrupted power for imaging, radiotherapy, and digital records, a patient’s anxiety is reduced to the one thing no law can cure-waiting time. SHANTI’s graded liability regime reduces barriers for smaller investors to build such plants while maintaining strict responsibility, and its unified rules simplify the journey from design to operation.
Second, better redress when things go wrong. The Bill creates an Atomic Energy Redressal Advisory Council-comprised of the AEC Chairperson, BARC Director, AERB Chairperson, and CEA Chairperson-to hear review applications and facilitate conciliation with technical depth. It designates Claims Commissioners within thirty days of a notified incident to adjudicate compensation swiftly, and empowers the Government to constitute a Nuclear Damage Claims Commission for severe cases with quasi judicial powers modeled on civil courts-but guided by natural justice for speed and sensitivity. This is justice engineered for emergencies.
Third, a secure, transparent ecosystem. Restricted information provisions protect sensitive data-about sites, materials, designs-without choking legitimate public outreach on safety. The Government retains exclusive control of enrichment, reprocessing of spent fuel, heavy water production, and isotopic separations; all spent fuel is cooled and ultimately delivered back to Government custody-never handled by private operators-so long term stewardship remains a sovereign function. At the same time, research, design and innovation are exempted from licensing (with safety and national security caveats), so startups and universities can explore prototypes, sensors, AI enabled monitoring, and advanced materials that make reactors safer and radiation uses more precise.
Our journey has also learned from adjacent sectors. When we opened space to private participation five years ago, a fledgling economy grew to $8 billion, with over 300 startups and a trajectory to quintuple within a decade. We expect a similar confidence effect here: alongside SHANTI, we have announced missions for SMRs with Rs 20,000 crore earmarked, and a Rs 1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation fund to catalyse private sector across domains. Nuclear energy will not be a solitary silo; it will be a node in India’s wider innovation surge.
Some worry about liability and courts; SHANTI is explicit. Operator carries the liability with caps graded by installation, backed by mandatory insurance or financial security; beyond the cap, the Nuclear Liability Fund and, if needed, international supplementary compensation pool can be tapped. Civil courts will not be clogged with technical claims; specialised redressal commission will adjudicate, with appeals routed to the Appellate Tribunal for Electricity (augmented with nuclear technical members) and, ultimately, to the Supreme Court. The intent is not to bypass justice, but to deliver it with speed, expertise and dignity.
And some fear sovereignty might be diluted; the opposite is true. Source and fissile materials remain under Government surveillance and accounting; uranium and thorium mining above notified grades is reserved to Government entities; acquisition rights in sensitive cases vest in the Centre; and emergency powers allow the Government to assume control across facilities and materials if the nation so demands. Sovereignty, safety, and scale reinforce each other.
In the end, a law is only as alive as the people it serves. I picture a small town whose street lights no longer flicker at midnight because a nearby reactor hums steadily; a farmer whose irradiated onions fetch a fairer price after a longer shelf life; a mother watching a linear accelerator calibrate a life saving dose; a young engineer writing an algorithm that catches an anomaly before it becomes an incident. That is the India SHANTI seeks to midwife: Viksit Bharat powered by clean, reliable energy, protected by robust regulation, and propelled by the ingenuity of its citizens. Rivers do not argue their way to the sea; they find it. With SHANTI, India’s nuclear river has found its course-safe, sovereign, and generous enough to carry every citizen with it.
(The author is Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Science and Technology; Earth Sciences and Minister of State for PMO; Department of Atomic Energy; Department of Space; Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions)