On December 18, 2025, India’s Parliament passed the Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India Bill—better known by its acronym, SHANTI—amid heated debate, sharp warnings, and pointed questions about its long-term impact. Marketed by the Modi government as a bold step toward clean energy and technological modernization, the Bill has instead ignited a wave of criticism from opposition leaders, legal scholars, and civil society, who see it as a dangerous gamble that puts public safety and justice on the line for the sake of private profit and global capital.
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, in a fiery speech during the Lok Sabha debate, minced no words: “I am not sure whether it is a nuclear Bill or an unclear Bill.” According to The Hindu, Tharoor lambasted the legislation as a “dangerous leap into privatised nuclear expansion” that lacks adequate safeguards for public safety, environmental protection, and victim justice. His critique cut to the core of the Bill’s most controversial provisions—chief among them, the opening up of nearly the entire nuclear energy sector, from mining to waste management, to private entities with few clearly defined qualification criteria.
“This effectively amounts to a blanket opening up of the entire nuclear energy sector to a wide range of private actors,” Tharoor warned, pointing out that profit-driven operations could compromise safety standards at every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle. The Bill, he argued, is “ridden with exceptions, heavy on discretion and largely indifferent to public welfare.” In his view, the pursuit of capital must never override the non-negotiable imperatives of public safety, environmental protection, and justice for victims in the event of an accident.
Another flashpoint is the Bill’s allowance for a single composite licence, enabling one entity to control mining, fuel fabrication, reactor operations, and waste handling. Tharoor sounded the alarm: “When profit becomes the primary motive across the entire chain, safety checks could be compromised at every stage.” He placed the Bill in historical perspective, recalling how India’s nuclear program was shaped by Jawaharlal Nehru and later strengthened by Manmohan Singh through the 2008 Indo-US nuclear deal, which ended India’s international isolation. “This Bill now confronts us with a disappointing reversal,” Tharoor lamented, adding that it deepens uncertainty over the future direction of India’s nuclear framework.
Resource constraints also loom large. Tharoor noted that India’s usable uranium reserves are finite, and while the country boasts significant thorium reserves, thorium-based reactors remain decades away from practical, large-scale deployment. “The full life cycle of nuclear fuel from mining to waste disposal is neither clean nor sustainable,” he said, challenging the government’s depiction of nuclear energy as a “clean and abundant source.”
But perhaps the most contentious aspect is the Bill’s approach to liability. The SHANTI Bill caps total liability for a nuclear incident at approximately $460 million (₹3,910 crore), a figure that has remained unchanged for 15 years—despite inflation, despite the lessons of Fukushima, and despite the growing scale of nuclear risks. “Despite inflation, despite Fukushima, despite everything we have learnt, this cap remains untouched,” Tharoor said, questioning whether it offers meaningful protection to affected communities.
Tharoor’s call for a comprehensive reworking of the Bill—and his suggestion that it be referred to a Joint Parliamentary Committee for deeper scrutiny—was echoed by critics outside Parliament as well. According to The Caravan, the SHANTI Bill is more than an energy policy; it is a “legal counterrevolution—designed to dismantle nuclear accountability, court global capital, and convert the Indian state into the ultimate insurer of private catastrophe.” In their view, the Bill represents a sharp turn toward nuclear impunity, rewriting the legal architecture to ensure that when nuclear power fails, the state—not corporations—picks up the tab.
This shift is not unique to India. Globally, nuclear power has always demanded exceptional legal regimes that shield operators and suppliers from the full costs of disaster. In Europe, liability regimes under the Paris and Vienna Conventions cap damages at levels far lower than the true costs of a severe accident. In the United States, the Price–Anderson Act socializes risk through federal indemnity and industry-wide pooling, shielding suppliers from meaningful legal exposure. The catastrophic events at Fukushima in 2011 laid bare the limitations of these systems: when the operator-liability regime collapsed under the weight of disaster, the Japanese state stepped in, nationalizing losses and absorbing costs that continue to mount.
India’s own approach to nuclear liability was shaped by the trauma of the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster, which killed thousands and injured hundreds of thousands more. The Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act of 2010, passed in the shadow of Bhopal, accepted global norms of no-fault operator liability and capped compensation. But it also introduced a statutory right of recourse against suppliers whose defective equipment or services caused an accident, and preserved victims’ access to other civil and criminal remedies. These modest departures from international norms were deeply unpopular with foreign suppliers, who for years refused to invest in India unless the country “harmonized” its liability regime.
SHANTI is the Modi government’s answer to this pressure. By restructuring liability through graded caps and revised thresholds, the Bill neutralizes supplier exposure and rationalizes operator liability, effectively making the state the insurer of last—and first—resort. This, critics argue, is not reform but a retreat from even symbolic accountability. As The Caravan puts it, “The state’s role is quietly transformed. It is no longer regulator and guardian of public safety. It becomes insurer, shock absorber, and political manager of disaster.”
The government justifies SHANTI in the language of climate urgency, arguing that nuclear power is essential for India’s energy transition. But critics note that nuclear energy remains among the most expensive and slowest forms of electricity generation in the country, with capacity stagnating below ten gigawatts while renewables have expanded far more rapidly and cheaply. What nuclear power offers, they argue, is not climate salvation but geopolitical symbolism—signaling technological modernity, strategic autonomy, and alignment with global power hierarchies.
There is also an imperial dimension to the reform. India is being positioned as a market for surplus nuclear technology from the Global North, with Western suppliers demanding immunity because their industries cannot survive exposure to genuine accountability. SHANTI aligns Indian law with the needs of global capital, not the realities of Indian society—a troubling move given that regulatory institutions remain weak, safety oversight is opaque, and public participation in emergency planning is minimal.
At its heart, nuclear liability law answers one question: who pays when prevention fails? With SHANTI, the answer is clear—the public pays, the state pays, and capital walks away. For critics, to describe SHANTI as technical reform is to miss the point. It is, in their words, “a moral and political choice about whose lives are expendable.”
As the dust settles on SHANTI’s passage, the debate is far from over. The atom, after all, demands memory—and the law must not forget.
