By Ramachandran Rajeev Kumar — 2026-02-17

On December 18, 2025, both houses of the Indian Parliament passed the Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India Bill -- a legislative instrument whose acronym, SHANTI, means peace in Hindi. The irony was noted by nobody, because the bill was passed by voice vote in a single week, the opposition walked out, and the country's attention was elsewhere.

It should not have been. The SHANTI Act is the most significant energy reform India has enacted since the Electricity Act of 2003. It repeals the Atomic Energy Act of 1962 and the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act of 2010 in a single stroke, dismantling sixty years of state monopoly over nuclear power and opening the sector to private companies, joint ventures, and foreign entities for the first time in independent India's history.

This is not incrementalism dressed up as reform. This is doctrinal change.

What Changed

Under the old framework, the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited held an effective monopoly on building, owning, and operating nuclear power plants. Private firms could manufacture components. They could supply services. But they could not own a reactor, generate nuclear electricity, or participate in the fuel cycle. Foreign companies faced an additional barrier: India's nuclear liability law, which imposed uncapped supplier liability in the event of an accident, had scared away every major international nuclear vendor since Fukushima.

The SHANTI Act rewrites all of it. Private Indian companies can now build, own, operate, and decommission nuclear power plants. Foreign entities can participate through joint ventures. The liability framework shifts from an uncapped, supplier-hostile model to a tiered structure with caps ranging from 100 crore to 3,000 crore rupees based on plant capacity. The Atomic Energy Regulatory Board -- India's nuclear safety watchdog -- receives statutory independence for the first time, functioning as an autonomous authority rather than a subsidiary of the Department of Atomic Energy it is supposed to regulate.

The government retains strategic control over enrichment, heavy water production, and spent fuel management. But everything else -- construction, generation, equipment manufacturing, and even uranium fuel fabrication up to government-set thresholds -- is now contestable.

The Budget Amplifier

Six weeks after the SHANTI Act received presidential assent, the Union Budget for 2026-27 delivered the fiscal accompaniment. Finance Minister Sitharaman zeroed out customs duties on all goods required for nuclear power generation -- fuel elements, control rods, absorber rods -- with the exemption extended until 2035 regardless of plant capacity. The basic customs duty on nuclear equipment dropped from 7.5 percent to zero.

The R&D budget for nuclear energy surged 88 percent year-on-year, from 1,285 crore to 2,411 crore rupees, with the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre receiving a near-doubling to 1,800 crore. The previous year's budget had already allocated 20,000 crore rupees for small modular reactor development, targeting five indigenously designed operational SMRs by 2033.

Read together, the law and the budget represent a coordinated industrial strategy: the SHANTI Act removes the regulatory barriers, the customs exemption removes the cost barriers, and the R&D surge accelerates the technology pipeline. India is not merely permitting nuclear expansion. It is subsidising it.

The Governance Imperative

This is where the Commander's caution applies, and it applies urgently.

Nuclear energy is not software. A coding error crashes an application. A reactor governance failure irradiates a community. The SHANTI Act's opening of the sector to private capital is necessary and overdue, but it introduces risks that India has never had to manage at this scale: the risk of cost-cutting in safety-critical systems, the risk of regulatory capture by private operators, and the risk of corruption in licensing, site selection, and environmental clearances for infrastructure that will operate for sixty to eighty years.

The statutory independence granted to the AERB is the right structural answer. But statutory independence means nothing if the institution lacks the staff, the budget, and the political backing to enforce its rulings against powerful private operators. India's experience with other independent regulators -- in telecom, in electricity, in financial markets -- suggests that the gap between statutory independence and operational independence can be wide and persistent.

Safety and transparency must be non-negotiable from the outset. Every reactor licence application should be public. Every safety inspection report should be accessible. Every environmental impact assessment should undergo genuine scrutiny rather than rubber-stamp approval. The temptation to fast-track approvals in the name of meeting the 100 GW target must be resisted, because the reputational and human cost of a single accident would set India's nuclear programme back by a generation.

The opportunity is enormous. But it must be kept clean. No possibility of corruption creeping into site allocations, no backroom deals on liability exemptions, no dilution of safety standards to accommodate politically connected developers. India is building critical infrastructure that will outlast every government that approves it. The governance framework must be designed for permanence, not convenience.

The 100 GW Horizon

India currently operates 23 nuclear reactors with a combined capacity of approximately 7.5 GW -- a fraction of its potential and a fraction of what its energy trajectory demands. The stated target is 22 GW by 2032 and 100 GW by 2047. The gap between 7.5 GW and 100 GW is not a target. It is a transformation.

Closing that gap on public sector balance sheets alone was never realistic. NPCIL's construction record, while competent, has been constrained by capital availability, procurement timelines, and the institutional caution of a government monopoly. The entry of private capital -- domestic industrial houses, foreign nuclear vendors, infrastructure funds -- changes the equation entirely. So does the SMR pipeline: smaller, modular, factory-built reactors that can be deployed at industrial sites, data centres, and remote locations without the decade-long construction timelines of conventional gigawatt-scale plants.

The data centre boom alone may prove to be the forcing function. India's AI ambitions, announced with great fanfare at the AI Impact Summit happening this very week in Delhi, require computational infrastructure that consumes enormous amounts of reliable baseload power. Solar and wind are intermittent. Gas is imported and expensive. Coal is politically toxic. Nuclear is the only zero-carbon baseload source that can scale to meet the energy demands of sovereign AI infrastructure -- a connection that India's policymakers appear to have made, even if the public discourse has not caught up.

The Quiet Revolution

The SHANTI Act did not trend on social media. It did not generate magazine covers or prime-time debates. It was overshadowed by budget headlines, AI summits, and cricket scores. But its consequences will outlast all of them.

India has opened its most strategically sensitive energy sector to market forces for the first time. It has restructured liability to attract international vendors. It has zeroed customs duties to reduce capital costs. It has doubled the R&D budget. And it has set a target that, if achieved, would make India one of the largest nuclear power producers on Earth.

The only question is whether the governance will match the ambition. A law named peace demands nothing less.