New Delhi – Parliament passed the SHANTI Bill in December 2025, repealing both the Atomic Energy Act of 1962 and the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act of 2010, and opening Indian nuclear power to private and foreign participation for the first time.
The Nuclear Energy Mission announced in February 2025 committed 20,000 crore rupees toward at least five Indian-designed small modular reactors operational by 2033.
Liability was always the obstacle
The 2010 liability law is why foreign reactor vendors stayed out of India for fifteen years. By allowing operators to seek recourse against suppliers, it exposed equipment manufacturers to open-ended liability that no other jurisdiction imposed, and no vendor would accept.
Repealing it removes the commercial blockage. It also removes a protection written after Bhopal, in a country with direct experience of a foreign-supplied industrial catastrophe and inadequate compensation. That trade-off deserves to be argued openly rather than treated as a technical fix.
Who is interested
Nuclear Power Corporation of India has tendered Bharat Small Reactors, compact 220 MWe pressurised heavy water units, drawing interest from Reliance, Tata Power, Adani, JSW Energy and Jindal Steel and Power.
That list is revealing. These are industrial groups with large captive power requirements, not utilities. The attraction is firm round-the-clock low-carbon supply for energy-intensive manufacturing, which solar with storage does not yet provide at that scale or reliability.
Bhabha Atomic Research Centre is developing a 200 MWe small modular reactor, a 50 MWe unit and a 5 MWt high temperature gas cooled design.
The disclosure question nobody has settled
Nuclear is low carbon and it is not renewable, and ESG frameworks treat it inconsistently. India climate finance taxonomy will have to take a position, and so will every fund whose mandate excludes nuclear while claiming to fund decarbonisation.
Source: SHANTI Bill passed by Parliament in December 2025, Union Budget 2025-26 Nuclear Energy Mission announcement, and NPCIL Bharat Small Reactor tenders.
