This piece of the article is authored By:-Akshita Tomar a 3rd year Law student at CHRIST UNIVERSITY & Prince Lucky Jaina 3rd year law student at Symbiosis Law School, Noida.
INTRODUCTION
The SHANTI Bill, 2025 signifies a clear break with the past in the way India manages its nuclear energy sector. For 70 years, nuclear energy has been the domain of the state alone, controlled tightly and kept away from the influence of market forces for reasons of security. The Act ends this monopoly by allowing private and foreign investment in nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is treated differently from other infrastructure by law. Its risks are huge and very long – term. A nuclear accident can make an area unfit for human habitation for hundreds of years and cause irreversible damage to the natural environment and the health of generations of people not yet born. Such facts raise important questions about the Constitution (Article 21) and environmental jurisprudence.
The government defends the reform with the help of climate change commitments, energy security, and developmental urgency. But the main criticism of the Act is that it mainly aims at opening the market for trading without first ensuring that the necessary institutional arrangements for public safety and accountability are in place. By doing so, it allows private capital to enter the sector where the stakes are that, if failure occurs, it will be irreversible, while at the same time the mechanisms for preventing and remedying such failure are still at a nascent stage.
FROM STATE MONOPOLY TO MARKET PARTICIPATION: WHAT THE SHANTI BILL RECONFIGURES
India developed its nuclear program entirely under state control. The Atomic Energy Act of 1962 gave the central government almost absolute power and did not allow private enterprises or significant parliamentary oversight. This setup was a consequence of the Cold War era anxieties, scarcity of technology and the fact that nuclear energy was considered inseparable from nuclear weapons. Economically, the monopoly was becoming untenable. State – run projects were plagued with delays, cost overruns and poor capacity utilization. The India, United States Civil Nuclear Agreement of 2008 facilitated access to foreign technology and fuel supply, thereby creating an impetus for liberalization. Reform became unavoidable, not necessarily because the state monopoly was intrinsically flawed, but because it was unable to deliver at the required speed.
The SHANTI Bill restructures the nuclear landscape in four major ways. It allows private and foreign companies to own and operate nuclear power plants, but only after obtaining a license. It also provides for different kinds of licenses for different types of reactors, which seems to be a way to prepare for advanced modular reactors. Moreover, it changes the liability system by capping the operator’s responsibility and increasing the use of insurance pools. Lastly, it supports the development and deployment of small modular reactors and next – generation nuclear technologies, implying that they are safer and more economically feasible. These alterations have the effect of handing over the day – to – day operations of a state enterprise, which is answerable to Parliament, to private operators who are mainly accountable to shareholders. The shifting of risk, the question of who takes it, who benefits from it, and who gets paid when it happens, is still very unclear.
REGULATION, SAFETY, AND THE ILLUSION OF READINESS
India’s nuclear reform has a major deficiency in its regulatory capacity. The Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) lacks statutory independence and operates under the administrative control of the Department of Atomic Energy, which is the entity responsible for promoting nuclear energy. This merging of the promoter and regulator in one body violates international safety standards and diminishes public trust., The SHANTI Bill does not correct this shortcoming. It provisions a great deal of rule – making authority to the executive, whereby the government is empowered to set safety standards, licensing criteria, and regulatory provisions by subordinate legislation. Thus, it gives political discretion exactly in the area where legal clarity is most needed. If safety relies on administrative circulars rather than parliamentary laws, then it is unstable and very likely to be affected by political pressure and bureaucratic inertia.
Private participation makes these vulnerabilities deeper. Private operators have better technical knowledge and more financial resources than regulatory agencies. This causes information asymmetry; regulators depend on operator disclosures to check compliance, thus allowing selfcertification and weakening enforcement. The risk of regulatory capture is higher when operators have the power to influence the standards that will be used to evaluate them. International experience is in line with this: nuclear regulation becomes ineffective when industry expertise dominates institutional capacity. A nuclear power plant run by a private company, without major strengthening of institutions, statutory independence for the regulator, more technical staff, transparent processes for standard setting, and strong powers for enforcement, changes safety from a legal guarantee to an administrative aspiration. The SHANTI Bill behaves as if these conditions were in place, they are not.
LIABILITY, ENVIRONMENT, AND THE DEMOCRATIC COST OF ACCELERATION
The liability regime uncovers a disturbing change in the manner in which the state perceives its obligation to the victims of nuclear harm. The Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, 2010 has already limited the operator’s liability and introduced a complicated insurance based compensation system. The SHANTI Bill goes beyond this, reducing direct operator accountability further while increasing the use of risk pooling mechanisms. Those affected will not find one entity responsible for them, but rather a maze of insurers, reinsurers, and contractual disclaimers. This is at odds with principles enshrined in the Constitution. Article 21 provides that the state has a nondelegable duty to protect the life and liberty of the citizens. The Supreme Court, in its various pronouncements, has recognized that this obligation includes the prevention of environmental harm and the provision of effective remedies in case of such harm. However, the SHANTI Bill moves the liability burden to private insurance markets that are guided by commercial logic rather than constitutional obligation. Indemnification is progressively turning into the outcome of a mathematical, statistical model rather than a process of rights recognition.
The environmental dimensions of the issue are equally worrying. New nuclear ventures will be necessitated to go through an environmental impact assessment and public consultation in accordance with the Environment Protection Act, 1986. However, these procedures have been gradually dismantled by shortened timelines, increased exemptions, and the frequent overriding of objections in the name of national interest. The SHANTI Bill speeds this up by presenting the nuclear extension as something that has to be done urgently and without any negotiation, thus subordinating the environmental due process implicitly to developmental imperatives.
The issues of land acquisition and radioactive waste management exacerbate the situation further. Nuclear installations need large exclusion zones, resulting in the displacement of people and the stoppage of using the land for other purposes for generations. India does not have a permanent storage facility for high level radioactive waste, which will remain dangerous for thousands of years. The SHANTI Bill does not really deal with these problems; it assumes that they can be handled through administration.
The loss of democracy is very significant. When decisions with consequences that cannot be reversed are taken without the involvement of the public, the governance system changes from democratic to technocratic. The SHANTI Bill is a potential instrument for removing people’s right to participate in decision making, which is a way of the state power being legitimated in constitutional democracy.
STRATEGIC AND FISCAL CONSEQUENCES OF PRIVATE NUCLEAR EXPANSION
Foreign participation introduces complex issues that go beyond just the economics of the situation. Nuclear technology is a double edged tool; reactor designs, fuel cycles, and even waste management can be used for both civilian and military purposes. Allowing foreign entities into this area raises concerns about technology transfer, control over intellectual property, and maintaining strategic autonomy in the long run. The SHANTI Bill barely provides any direction and mostly leaves the decision up to the executive.
There is a clear lack of parliamentary oversight. Unlike defence procurement, which gets the attention of the legislature, the Act gives the executive the power to make commercial nuclear agreements with very little accountability. This lack of transparency goes against the principles of democratic governance and, therefore, it creates opportunities for rent seeking.
From a financial point of view, nuclear power in the private sector is a major risk for the Indian state. Nuclear projects require a lot of capital, are vulnerable to cost overruns, and depend on price stability over a long period. Private operators will ask for the state to provide guarantees for the supply of fuel, connectivity to the grid, minimum prices, and regulatory stability. If a project fails, the state will take on the losses while the profits will remain in the hands of private entities. The cost of dismantling the plant, which will be a few decades after the closure of the operations, will almost certainly be covered by public finances. The SHANTI Bill shifts the strategic and financial risk to the outside while keeping the commercial benefit on the inside.
CONCLUSION: RECLAIMING PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY IN INDIA’S NUCLEAR TRANSITION
The SHANTI Bill is not, in any way, a deliberately harmful piece of legislation. India’s power demands are legitimate, and nuclear energy can certainly be part of a clean energy mix in the future if it is managed well. However, this Act lacks a lot of essential features structurally. It is built on the assumption of institutional readiness which is not the case, it allocates risks without disclosing them and it places the democratic process at the service of the commercial urgency.
Nuclear energy requires very strict regulation due to very few, but highly severe failures. It must have a victim centric liability system since the damage, in the case of occurrence, will be complete. It should be subject to environmental due process since the impacts will be irreversible. The SHANTI Bill falls short of providing any of these with sufficient rigor.
Private participation ought to be conditional rather than assumed. Regulatory independence should be guaranteed through law. Financial commitments should be made public and scrutinized. Democratic oversight must be real and not just for show.
The future of nuclear power in India should not be left to the law of urgency alone but should be regulated by laws that are able to control risk, assign responsibility and protect constitutional rights. The SHANTI Bill, in its current form, is giving priority to speed over safety, capital over accountability and executive discretion over democratic deliberation. Opening the atom is, therefore, a risky move with very high stakes, the terms of which are not justified, until these shortcomings are fixed.