India's Nuclear Revolution Has Restarted. R&D Must Follow — Fast.

The SHANTI Bill is a landmark. But without urgent R&D coordination, India risks becoming a buyer of foreign tech rather than a builder of its own.

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“When nuclear energy has been successfully applied for power production, in say a couple of decades from now, India will not have to look abroad for its experts but will find them ready at hand.”
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‍— Homi J. Bhabha, in a letter to the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, March 1944

A Historic Revival — and a Long Pending One

Bhabha wrote those words before India was even an independent nation. Eight decades later, the country he helped shape as a nuclear pioneer has finally done something it resisted for over six decades: it has opened the civil nuclear energy sector to private enterprise. The Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India (SHANTI) Bill, passed by both Houses of Parliament and granted Presidential assent in December 2025, repeals the Atomic Energy Act of 1962 and the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act of 2010 in a single stroke. For the first time since Independence, private Indian companies can build, own, operate, and decommission nuclear power plants. The Atomic Energy Regulatory Board has been granted statutory independence. Liability has been restructured to align, at least partially, with international conventions.
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The verdict from industry has been enthusiastic, and understandably so. Holtec International has announced plans to deploy up to 200 small modular reactors in India through its subsidiary. The Adani Group is exploring nuclear plants to power its AI data centre ambitions. Tata Consulting Engineers and Larsen & Toubro are positioning themselves for a transnational nuclear manufacturing corridor. But enthusiasm is not strategy, and the passage of a Bill is not the same as the transformation of a sector. The SHANTI Bill addresses a genuine bottleneck. We now need to address a deeper one.
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The Arithmetic of Nuclear Energy’s Necessity
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India operates just 25 nuclear reactors producing roughly 8.88 GW, barely 3% of total electricity generation. The government’s target of 100 GW of nuclear capacity by 2047 represents a more than tenfold increase, requiring an estimated 19 lakh crore ($214 billion) in cumulative investment. The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited, burdened with monopoly responsibility and dependent on government budgetary allocations, simply cannot execute an expansion of this magnitude alone. NPCIL’s interest payments on borrowed capital often exceed the cost of the reactor components themselves, and its strategy of building reactors in small numbers without standardised designs has denied suppliers any economies of scale.
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The execution record is sobering. India’s PSUs have missed every major nuclear capacity target set for the industry. The Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor at Kalpakkam, originally scheduled for commissioning in 2010, has yet to reach criticality. Of the ten 700 MW pressurised heavy water reactors meant to be built in “fleet mode,” only four are likely to be operational by 2030. At Kudankulam, cost escalations pushed the project from Rs 13,171 crore to over Rs 22,000 crore. The Jaitapur project with France’s EDF has been in negotiation for over fifteen years without a single pour of concrete. Bringing in private capital and execution capacity is not a luxury; it is necessary. To that extent, the Bill is overdue and welcome.
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A Deeper Deficit: Six Decades of Closed R&D
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Yet the larger question is not who builds India’s reactors, but what goes inside them. For six decades, India’s nuclear R&D ecosystem has been one of the most closed and centralised in the world. Research, experimentation, and technology development have been confined almost entirely to government laboratories under the Department of Atomic Energy. Private firms, start-ups, and universities have been systematically excluded from frontier nuclear science. The result is a paradox familiar to students of Indian industrial history: a country with world-class scientific talent and decades of operational experience, yet one that trails global leaders in nearly every emerging nuclear technology domain that will define the sector’s future.
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Consider small modular reactors (SMRs), the most commercially promising pathway for rapid nuclear scale-up. The United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and China each have multiple SMR designs in advanced testing or early deployment. India has none in the private sector. The government’s Nuclear Energy Mission, backed by a Rs 20,000 crore allocation, aims to develop at least five indigenous SMR designs by 2033 — an ambitious timeline that these PSUs’ track records do not inspire confidence in meeting. In light water reactor technologies, which dominate the global fleet, India’s experience remains import-dependent and operationally narrow. In advanced reactor concepts — molten salt, high-temperature gas, hybrid designs — India’s work remains confined to long-gestation, PSU-led programmes with limited external validation. In experimental infrastructure — the versatile test reactors that serve as the backbone of advanced nuclear R&D in the US, France, and China — India lacks a modern, open ecosystem accessible to industry and academia.
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These are not niche concerns. They are the difference between India becoming a technology leader and India becoming a dependent market for someone else’s technology. By the time indigenous SMR designs mature, the domestic market could be locked into foreign platforms, with all the fuel supply dependencies and intellectual property constraints that entails. Opening deployment without opening innovation is half a reform.
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The Tech Leapfrog Imperative: Baseload Energy Cannot Wait
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The urgency is compounded by a convergent demand avalanche that India’s energy planners did not fully anticipate: the superposition of rapid urbanisation, complex premiumisation, advanced manufacturing, and artificial intelligence. That India is accelerating its GDP growth towards the $10 trillion target more aggressively than anticipated is not recent news. However, the rate of urbanisation and premiumisation, and the growth of advanced manufacturing have presented a superposition of accelerated demand that took a decade of focused investments to cater to.
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Now, India’s technological leapfrog towards indigenous AI will add more to this accelerated demand. India’s data centre capacity is projected to grow from 960 MW to 9.2 GW by 2030 — a ninefold increase, according to Nomura. The IEA estimates global electricity demand from data centres will more than double by 2030. AI-optimised servers consume up to ten times more power than standard ones. As the Prime Minister himself noted when championing the SHANTI Bill, nuclear will be essential - “From safely powering AI to enabling green manufacturing.”
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Renewables alone cannot meet this demand. Solar and wind are intermittent; battery storage remains expensive at utility scale. Nuclear energy, with its 24/7 baseload capability, negligible carbon footprint, and land efficiency roughly twenty times greater than solar, is the natural complement. Globally, hyper-scalers are already signing contracts for nuclear-powered data centres. If India does not build indigenous capability, it will import it.  We must avoid another set of strategic dependencies at the heart of its digital economy.
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ISRO Has Set The Template For Accelerating R&D
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India’s broader R&D landscape underscores the structural nature of this problem. The country spends roughly 0.65 per cent of GDP on research and development, well below the global average of 1.79 per cent and a fraction of what China (2.68 per cent), the United States (3.6 per cent), or South Korea (5.2 per cent) invest. In nuclear energy, this underinvestment has been compounded by legal prohibition. The institutions, incentive systems, and talent pipelines needed to sustain frontier nuclear research simply do not exist at scale outside government.
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The space sector offers a useful analogy. When ISRO began opening space to private participation, the number of space start-ups rose from virtually zero to nearly 300 within a few years. Corporate participation began to increase, global customer interest became more tangible, and India’s space economy is now projected to cross $40 billion by 2033. ISRO’s engagement with the private sector is a globally acknowledged example of technical competitiveness, cost efficiency, and talent convergence delivering world-class quality. The nuclear sector has arguably greater commercial potential and certainly greater strategic consequence. It is time to launch the ISRO of nuclear technology in India.
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But the space analogy carries a warning. ISRO’s decades of open engagement with industry and academia created the foundation on which private innovation could build. The nuclear establishment has no equivalent legacy. Building one will require deliberate and urgent policy action, not just legislative permission.
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What Must Change Now
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Four interventions are essential. First, dedicated nuclear R&D funding through the new National Nuclear Energy Mission (NNEM) must be opened to private firms through competitive, milestone-driven windows — for SMRs, advanced reactors, nuclear materials, and digital safety systems. Second, India needs shared national test infrastructure — versatile test reactors, simulation centres, materials testing facilities — accessible to academia and start-ups, not locked inside DAE campuses. Third, India’s IITs, IISc, and research universities must be embedded into nuclear R&D as core innovation engines through funded research chairs, industry-sponsored laboratories, and doctoral pipelines aligned with NNEM priorities. Fourth, PSUs should be required to co-invest in private nuclear R&D, mirroring models in the US and China where state backing accelerates private innovation rather than substituting for it.
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The concerns about the SHANTI Bill, particularly the removal of supplier liability, are not without merit and deserve serious regulatory attention as implementation proceeds. But the larger risk is that the Bill does not go far enough. Opening deployment to private capital while keeping R&D locked in government silos would produce a peculiar outcome: India could become one of the world’s largest nuclear markets while remaining a marginal nuclear innovator.

From Control to Diffusion of Capability

Nuclear energy is a strategic technology domain that intersects with geopolitics, defence, climate diplomacy, sustainable development, and industrial competitiveness. Countries that lead in nuclear R&D shape global standards, supply chains, and geopolitical influence. China’s ambitions are explicit and generously funded. The United States leverages private contractors, national laboratories, and university partnerships to maintain primacy. France treats its nuclear estate as a pillar of sovereignty. India, with its demographic scale and scientific depth, has every reason to be in this league.
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Bhabha’s vision in 1944 was not merely about building reactors. It was about building indigenous capability so that India would never have to look abroad for its core needs. The SHANTI Bill is a necessary condition for realising that vision; it is not a sufficient one. The next step, a harder, less glamorous, but more consequential one, is to open India’s nuclear R&D ecosystem with the same boldness with which Parliament has opened its nuclear market. 

The country that built a successful nuclear programme under international constraints surely has the confidence to trust its private sector and its young scientists with the most complex energy transition in its history. The cost of hesitation, as always, would be generational.