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 the evening.
With the introduction of the SHANTI Bill—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 and clean energy.
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 them together, repealing and replacing them with a single, modern architecture—in one stroke conferring statutory status 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.
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 of 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—`3,000 crore for the largest reactors, down to `100 crore for smaller ones and fuel‑cycle facilities—so that innovation such as small and 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 healing. In agriculture, radiation technologies already help preserve produce, extend shelf life, and ensure safety.
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.
What changes, then, in the citizen’s daily life? First, power you can trust—24×7 and low‑carbon, 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 30 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 modelled on civil courts. This is justice engineered for emergencies.
Third, a transparent ecosystem. Restricted information provisions protect sensitive data without choking legitimate public outreach on safety. The government retains exclusive control of enrichment, reprocessing of spent fuel, heavy-water production, and isotopic separations—so long‑term stewardship remains a sovereign function. 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.Jitendra Singh
Alongside SHANTI, we have announced missions for SMRs with `20,000 crore earmarked, and a `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 on this. The 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; a specialised redress commission will adjudicate, with appeals routed to the Appellate Tribunal for Electricity (augmented with nuclear technical members) and, ultimately, to the Supreme Court.
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.
(Views are personal)
Jitendra Singh
Union Minister of State, PMO, and Earth Sciences, Science & Technology (Independent Charge)