PIB TrackerSHANTI Act aligns India's nuclear liability rules
A new law that reshapes India's civil nuclear liability regime to bring it in step with the global framework and ease foreign-supplier participation in reactor projects.
What happened
- In a written reply in the Rajya Sabha on the impact of the India-US civil nuclear agreement, the Department of Atomic Energy confirmed that with the enactment of the SHANTI Act, India's civil nuclear liability regime is now aligned with the international civil liability framework.
- The reply identifies the specific friction the new law removes: two provisions of the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage (CLND) Act, 2010 — section 17(b) (the operator's right of recourse against the supplier) and section 46 — which were out of step with the international regime.
- Those two provisions had generated apprehension among foreign suppliers and were cited as a reason that two large import-based projects had stalled: Jaitapur in Maharashtra (with France) and Kovvada in Andhra Pradesh (with the United States).
- The reply situates the change within the longer arc that began with the India-US Civil Nuclear Agreement of 2008, which opened the door to fuel imports and new reactors placed under IAEA safeguards.
- It also reports the operating picture today: 16 reactors (6,380 MW) are under IAEA safeguards and run on imported fuel, and four more reactors are under construction at Kudankulam (KKNPP units 3–6, with Russia).
- The minister of state, Dr Jitendra Singh, submitted the reply, framing the SHANTI Act as the legislative step that unlocks the long-pending supplier negotiations.
Background & context
To read the SHANTI Act correctly, an aspirant has to hold three layers of the story together — the diplomatic opening of 2008, the liability law of 2010 that followed, and the corrective law of 2026 that is now in the news.
The first layer is the India-US Civil Nuclear Agreement (the 123 Agreement) of 2008. It ended India's decades-long isolation from civil nuclear commerce that had followed the 1974 and 1998 tests. The agreement was made possible by a clean waiver from the 48-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and a separate India-IAEA safeguards agreement that placed India's civilian reactors (but not its strategic facilities) under international inspection. The practical pay-off was that India could now legally import uranium fuel and source reactors from abroad, which is why the present reply ties imported-fuel reactors and rising generation directly back to 2008.
The second layer is the CLND Act, 2010. After the 2008 opening, India needed a domestic liability law before suppliers would build here, and it needed to join the international compensation architecture — the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSC), which India signed in 2010 and ratified in 2016. The global norm in that architecture is channelling all liability to the operator — the entity that runs the plant — so that victims have a single, certain address for compensation and suppliers are shielded. India's 2010 Act broke from that norm in two places. Section 17(b) gave the operator a statutory right of recourse against the supplier where an accident resulted from defective equipment or sub-standard services, and section 46 was widely read as leaving the door open to additional civil claims against suppliers under other laws (including tort). For an Indian audience this was a deliberate, post-Bhopal political choice — it refused to let an equipment maker walk away. But for foreign vendors it converted nuclear supply into an open-ended, uninsurable risk, and that is the apprehension the reply names.
The third layer is the SHANTI Act itself — the corrective legislation that the reply says has now been enacted. Its stated effect is to bring section 17(b) and section 46 into line with the channelling principle of the international framework, so that liability rests predictably with the operator and the supplier's exposure is bounded. That is the change that, in the government's account, removes the legal obstacle that had kept Jaitapur and Kovvada on paper.
It helps to place the two stalled projects in context, because they are the test cases the whole debate turns on. Jaitapur, on the Konkan coast of Maharashtra, was conceived as one of the largest nuclear parks in the world, built around EPR (European Pressurised Reactor) units supplied by France's vendor and operated by NPCIL; it had carried both liability and local land/environment objections for years. Kovvada, in Srikakulam district of Andhra Pradesh, was the project earmarked for American reactor technology after the site was shifted from an earlier location. Both were the visible, named casualties of the liability deadlock — which is exactly why the reply pairs them with section 17(b) and section 46. A reader who can name the State, the foreign partner and the reactor type for each is well covered for any pairing or statement-based question.
The institutional machinery around these projects is also worth fixing in memory, since the same set of bodies recurs across every nuclear-energy question. The Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), set up in 1954 and working directly under the Prime Minister, is the policy and administrative home. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) is the apex policy body; the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) is the public-sector operator that actually builds and runs the power reactors; and the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), constituted in 1983, is the independent safety regulator. The governing statute behind all of this is the Atomic Energy Act, 1962, which is distinct from the liability laws and which reserves atomic energy as a near-exclusive domain of the Central government. The SHANTI Act sits alongside this architecture as a liability-regime correction, not a replacement of any of these bodies.
For Prelims
- Entity type: a Central law (an Act of Parliament) amending/realigning India's civil nuclear liability regime — administered through the Department of Atomic Energy under the Prime Minister's charge.
- What it does: aligns India's civil nuclear liability with the international framework by addressing CLND Act, 2010 sections 17(b) (operator's right of recourse against the supplier) and 46.
- Predecessor law it corrects: the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage (CLND) Act, 2010 — itself the domestic counterpart of the global CSC (Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage), which India signed in 2010 and ratified in 2016.
- The diplomatic origin: the India-US Civil Nuclear Agreement (2008), which followed the NSG waiver and the India-IAEA safeguards agreement and enabled fuel import + foreign reactors under safeguards.
- Projects it unblocks: Jaitapur (Maharashtra · France · EPR reactors) and Kovvada (Andhra Pradesh · United States) — both import-based and previously stalled.
- Operating numbers (from the reply): 16 reactors (6,380 MW, excluding RAPS-1) under IAEA safeguards on imported fuel; capacity up from 4,020 MW (2007-08) to 8,780 MW now; generation up from 16,956 MU to 56,681 MU (2024-25); four KKNPP units (3–6, Russia) under construction.
- Administering chain: policy/operator side under the Department of Atomic Energy and the Atomic Energy Commission; the public-sector operator is NPCIL; the independent safety regulator is the AERB (Atomic Energy Regulatory Board).
- What it is NOT: the SHANTI Act is not a repeal of the CLND Act, 2010 wholesale, and it does not abolish operator liability — the international model it adopts channels liability to the operator rather than removing it. It is also not the India-US 123 Agreement itself (that is a 2008 bilateral treaty), and it is not an India-IAEA safeguards instrument. It does not change India's weapons or strategic facilities, which remain outside safeguards.
Why it matters
The problem the SHANTI Act addresses is precise: India had the diplomatic access (2008) and the fuel (imported uranium under safeguards), but its own liability law had frozen the next stage — actually buying and building foreign-designed reactors at scale. No serious French or American vendor would sign a multi-decade build when section 17(b) and section 46 left it exposed to open-ended recourse that no insurance pool would cover. The result was a decade and a half in which the marquee import projects — Jaitapur and Kovvada — never moved past site and negotiation stages even though the political relationships were in place.
Aligning the liability regime with the international channelling principle is what makes those negotiations bankable again. It also matters for the larger energy and climate arithmetic. India's nuclear capacity has roughly doubled since 2007-08 (4,020 MW to 8,780 MW), yet nuclear remains a small slice of the grid, and the government's stated ambition is a steep expansion of clean, firm baseload power to support a Viksit Bharat-era demand curve and net-zero commitments. Large foreign-partnered reactors are one of the few ways to add gigawatt-scale low-carbon baseload quickly, so a liability fix is the legal precondition for the whole import-reactor strategy. There is a genuine tension the aspirant should be able to articulate: the 2010 design protected the supplier-accountability principle (the Bhopal lesson) at the cost of investment, while the 2026 realignment buys investment at the cost of a domestic political question about how far supplier accountability is diluted.