PIB TrackerSHANTI Act anchors India's 100 GW nuclear push
A high-level workshop on operationalising the SHANTI Act, 2025 — the law that opens nuclear power to private players on the road to a 100 GW target.
What happened
- The Central Electricity Authority (CEA) hosted a high-level workshop on putting the SHANTI Act, 2025 into practice, jointly with the Ministry of Power, the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and NTPC Limited.
- The Act is positioned as the legislative cornerstone for scaling India's installed nuclear capacity to 100 GW, framed around two goals: long-term energy security and the country's Net Zero commitment.
- The headline shift the law makes is structural — it opens the nuclear power sector to private participation for the first time, where generation had been a closed government monopoly.
- Speakers included Ghanshyam Prasad (Chairperson, CEA) on round-the-clock clean energy and secure fuel through diversification; Seema Jain (Member-Finance, DAE) on financial preparedness and risk-sharing; and Gurdeep Singh (CMD, NTPC), who underlined that the Act now lets industry treat nuclear as a viable clean-power source.
- The agenda ran across seven focus areas, from decoding the Act and fuel security to siting, technology access, localisation, financing, and Small/Micro Modular Reactor (SMR/MMR) development.
- The workshop drew 150+ delegates from 19 states, central ministries, regulators, and both public and private developers.
Background & context
India's civil nuclear programme has, until now, run inside a tightly closed legal box. The Atomic Energy Act, 1962 reserved the production, development and use of atomic energy for the Central Government, which is why nuclear generation has been carried out almost entirely by public-sector undertakings under the DAE — chiefly the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL), with Bharatiya Nabhikiya Vidyut Nigam Limited (BHAVINI) handling the fast-breeder line. Private and even most other public companies were locked out of owning and operating reactors. The SHANTI Act, 2025 is the legislative move that loosens this monopoly and lets private developers into the field, which is why the workshop framed the law as a turning point rather than a routine amendment.
Two structural ceilings have long held Indian nuclear capacity down. The first was capital and ownership: a handful of public utilities could not finance a tenfold capacity jump alone. The second was the liability regime created after the 2008 India–US civil nuclear deal — the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage (CLND) Act, 2010, whose supplier-liability provisions (notably the right of recourse against equipment suppliers) made foreign and private vendors wary of the Indian market. The SHANTI Act's graded liability framework is the policy answer to that second ceiling, aiming to make participation commercially predictable without abandoning accountability for nuclear damage. The law is also to be harmonised with the Electricity Act, 2003, so that privately built nuclear plants can sell power within the same tariff, open-access and regulatory architecture that governs the rest of the grid.
The 100 GW figure is the anchor number. India's nuclear fleet has historically supplied only a small share of total electricity — on the order of roughly 8 GW of installed nuclear capacity against a total installed base of several hundred gigawatts — so a 100 GW ambition implies an order-of-magnitude expansion stretched over decades to mid-century. The workshop tied this directly to the Net Zero pledge India announced at COP26 (Glasgow) of reaching net-zero emissions by 2070: firm, dispatchable, low-carbon baseload is the gap that solar and wind alone cannot fill, and nuclear is being positioned to provide that 24/7 clean backbone.
India's home-grown nuclear effort has long been organised around a three-stage programme first set out by Homi Bhabha: Stage I uses Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs) running on natural uranium; Stage II uses Fast Breeder Reactors (FBRs) fed by the plutonium that Stage I produces; and Stage III is meant to tap the country's vast thorium reserves through a thorium-uranium-233 cycle. This roadmap exists because India is uranium-poor but thorium-rich, holding one of the world's largest monazite-thorium reserves along its coastal sands. The fuel-security stress at the workshop — domestic capability, diversified sourcing and strategic reserves — flows from exactly this constraint, and is shaped by India being outside the Nuclear Suppliers Group while operating under the 2008 NSG waiver that lets it import uranium and reactors from countries such as Russia, France and the United States.
The reactor technologies named in the agenda place India alongside a wider global shift. Conventional reactors are large gigawatt-scale units built on site over many years; Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are factory-built units typically rated up to around 300 MWe per module, and Micro Modular Reactors (MMRs) are smaller still, in the single-digit to tens-of-MW range, suited to remote or industrial sites. The appeal is standardised, transportable construction that cuts cost and build time. India's own fleet today is anchored by indigenous 700 MWe PHWRs and by imported light-water units — most visibly the Russian-built VVERs at Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu — so adding modular reactors and private builders represents a genuine widening of both who builds nuclear plants and what kind they build.
For Prelims
- Entity: SHANTI Act, 2025 — the enabling statute for India's 100 GW nuclear roadmap and the first law to permit private-sector participation in nuclear power generation.
- Nodal chain: Ministry of Power + Department of Atomic Energy (DAE); workshop convened by the Central Electricity Authority (CEA), the statutory technical advisory body under the Ministry of Power; NTPC Limited as the flagship public generator entering the space.
- Target: scale nuclear capacity to 100 GW — driven by energy security and Net Zero (India's net-zero year is 2070).
- Key provision — liability: a graded liability framework, addressing supplier concerns left by the CLND Act, 2010.
- Harmonisation: the Act is to be aligned with the Electricity Act, 2003, so nuclear plants slot into the national power market.
- Technology pathway flagged: SMRs and MMRs (Small and Micro Modular Reactors) for flexible, faster, modular deployment — including the de-risking idea of repurposing retiring thermal power plant sites for new reactors.
- Fuel security: stress on domestic capability, diversified sourcing (India is not a member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group but received an NSG waiver in 2008), long-term procurement and strategic reserves.
- Scale of the workshop: 150+ delegates from 19 states, central ministries, regulators and public/private developers; seven focus areas.
- The wider institutional set (know the chain): the apex policy body is the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC); the regulator is the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), constituted in 1983 under the Atomic Energy Act, 1962; the operators are NPCIL (PHWRs and imported LWRs) and BHAVINI (the fast-breeder reactor at Kalpakkam).
Why it matters
The problem the law addresses is concrete: India's electricity demand keeps climbing while it has pledged to decarbonise, and renewables, for all their growth, are intermittent — they cannot by themselves guarantee firm power at night or through a windless week. Nuclear is one of the few large-scale, low-carbon sources that runs as steady baseload. But the old legal frame meant only a few cash-constrained public utilities could build it, and the post-2010 liability cloud kept private capital and foreign technology away. By admitting private players and softening the liability deterrent, the SHANTI Act tries to unlock the financing, the technology partnerships and the project pipeline a 100 GW build-out actually needs.
The siting and technology choices flagged at the workshop matter just as much as the ownership change. Repurposing the land, grid connections, water access and trained workforce of retiring thermal plants for new reactors is a de-risking shortcut that lowers cost and speeds approvals. And the focus on SMRs and MMRs signals a bet on smaller, factory-built, modular units that can be deployed faster and sited closer to industrial demand than conventional gigawatt-scale reactors. Together these point to a nuclear expansion that is not just bigger but differently shaped — more distributed, more private, and more tightly woven into the commercial power market.