India’s recent nuclear move is about to change who controls the atom |
India’s Ministry of Power this week released the Draft National Electricity Policy 2026 (NEP), a long-term power strategy that seeks to transform the country’s power sector in line with its broader development agenda and the nuclear goals set out in the recently enacted Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India Act (SHANTI), passed in December 2025.
The NEP identifies nuclear power as a “clean, reliable, and sustainable energy source with significant potential for India’s long-term energy security.” To expand nuclear capacity to 100 GW by 2047, “the Central Government will collaborate with the private sector for setting up modular reactors, developing Bharat Small Reactors, and advancing next-generation nuclear technologies.”
For much of the post-Cold War period, nuclear energy remained paradoxically out of reach for much of the Global South, even as demand for reliable baseload power surged across Asia and Africa. Nuclear power was constrained not just by cost and technology, but by liability regimes, insurance structures, and financing models designed around advanced economies with deep capital markets, leaving few workable options for developing countries. India’s SHANTI Act quietly shifts this landscape by recalibrating liability norms, enabling scalable reactor technologies, and reinforcing cooperation with longstanding partners.
One of the most persistent obstacles to nuclear deployment in developing countries has been liability exposure, exemplified by India’s earlier framework under the Atomic Energy Act of 1962 and the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act of 2010, where statutory supplier liability in the 2010 law deterred most global vendors and investors.
The SHANTI Act decisively alters this equation. By repealing earlier laws and aligning India’s liability framework with the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSC), SHANTI shifts supplier liability from statute to contract and introduces a graded, capacity‑linked cap on operator liability, with any residual liability beyond these caps resting with the state as sovereign backstop.
Section 13 caps operator liability at 300 million Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), equal to around $430 million (SDR is an international reserve asset maintained by the IMF to help supplement countries’ official........