SHANTI or surrender?

The Modi government has perfected the art of finding acronyms that serve a solitary purpose — brand-building. If some of these acronyms are to rename old schemes and claim them as its own, others are to hide the government’s real intent. The SHANTI Bill, 2025 is an excellent example of the obfuscating variety of acronyms. Spell it out — Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India — and you won’t see shanti (peace) anywhere on the horizon.

Marketed as a peaceful roadmap for nuclear energy growth, the name belies an unsettling shift in India’s nuclear liability regime and governance. The changes it proposes will have broad implications for public safety and accountability. It reverses longstanding legal safeguards designed to protect the victims of nuclear incidents and preserve India’s sovereignty over its nuclear programme. Hailed by the US administration, the Bill exposes the double-standards of a government that is always invoking ‘national interest’.

Introduced in Parliament on 10 December during the winter session, the Bill was not referred to any joint parliamentary committee, select committee or standing committee — mechanisms that exist so that complex legislation may be rigorously examined. It sailed through both Houses of Parliament in 10 days, was granted presidential assent on 20 December and notified as law on 22 December.

The obvious question is: why the haste? Was it meant to outpace domestic opposition or reassure international nuclear vendors eager for high-value contracts? To grasp the magnitude of what is being dismantled, one must revisit the existing legal regime — the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act of 2010.

That law emerged from the shadow of the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy, which claimed thousands of lives, injured millions and exposed glaring gaps in industrial accountability.

Survivors waged a decades-long struggle for justice against a multinational corporation that largely escaped meaningful reparation. The 2010 Act was shaped by this collective memory and carried a clear moral purpose — to ensure that victims of a nuclear accident would never again be left without recourse.

Crucially, the Act did not confine liability solely to plant operators — the entities that run nuclear facilities — but extended it to suppliers as well. These suppliers include manufacturers and vendors of reactors, components, fuel and nuclear technology, such as General Electric and Westinghouse from the United States, Russia’s Rosatom and France’s Areva (now Orano).

Clause 17(b) of the 2010 Act empowered operators to seek compensation from suppliers if a nuclear incident resulted from defective equipment or sub-standard materials, preventing any link in the supply chain from evading responsibility.

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Russia and France chose to work within India’s legal framework. Russia entered into agreements for the Kudankulam nuclear plant in Tamil Nadu, where Units 1 and 2 are already operational, with further expansion underway. France, meanwhile, advanced plans for the Jaitapur project in Maharashtra, where preliminary work has moved ahead despite sustained local resistance. Both countries addressed liability concerns through insurance pools or bilateral arrangements.

American corporations, wary of litigation in their highly litigious environment, viewed supplier liability as untenable. This stance created a geopolitical impasse, chilling US nuclear bids in India despite the landmark 2008 Indo–US Civil Nuclear Agreement.

Diplomatic correspondence and industry assessments from that period reveal sustained pressure from Washington to dilute Clause 17(b), with the argument that it diverged from international frameworks such as the Vienna Convention on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage.

SHANTI 2025 decisively removes supplier liability, placing full accountability on the plant owner — typically a public-sector entity such as the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) — while limiting supplier responsibility to private contracts. This is unprecedented. Foreign suppliers are effectively ringfenced from legal accountability should disaster strike.

Consider what is at stake. Nuclear catastrophes — such as Chernobyl in 1986, which contaminated vast regions of Europe, or Fukushima (Japan) in 2011, which displaced hundreds of thousands and inflicted economic losses running into trillions — demonstrate that accidents rarely respect legal fine print.

Under SHANTI, if defective components supplied by an American, Russian or French firm contribute to a comparable incident, victims may be forced to navigate opaque contractual arrangements, even as the costs of evacuation, remediation, compensation and long-term healthcare are borne overwhelmingly by the State and, ultimately, by taxpayers.

The problem is compounded by the retention of laughably inadequate liability ceilings — Rs 100 crore for small research reactors and Rs 1,500 crore for large power plants — figures frozen in time since 2010. Even without accounting for inflation, these sums bear no resemblance to the real costs of nuclear disasters.

The government has offered no credible explanation why these limits have not been updated.

Beyond liability, SHANTI dismantles another established safeguard by opening the nuclear sector to private operators — without any broad political or societal consensus. Opposition parties across the spectrum, from the Congress to several regional formations, have warned that private profit motives in a high-risk industry could encourage corner-cutting on safety.

India’s nuclear programme, governed for decades by the Atomic Energy Act of 1962, was deliberately insulated from commercialisation precisely because of its dual-use potential and proliferation risks. Allowing private — and potentially foreign — players to enter this space without exhaustive debate heightens the danger of technology leakage and uneven safety enforcement.

The policy shift manifests as a ‘vendor-driven’ expansion strategy, favouring foreign suppliers with ready-made reactor designs rather than indigenous technologies like the pressurised heavy water reactors developed by the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre.

The irony is impossible to miss when viewed against the BJP’s own political record. In 2008, while in opposition, the BJP mounted a ferocious campaign against the Indo–US Civil Nuclear Agreement, portraying it as a grave betrayal of national interest. Its objections rested on three core claims: the erosion of national sovereignty, the dilution of strategic autonomy and the absence of political legitimacy.

Seventeen years later, the same party has steered SHANTI through Parliament with barely a murmur of dissent. What accounts for this reversal? If weakening supplier liability is not capitulation to foreign — particularly American — corporate pressure, what is? And where is the democratic legitimacy of forcing through these sweeping changes without consultation, scrutiny or consensus?