SHANTI Act

Imagine a country that, for over sixty years, insisted only a single state department could ever build, own or run a power plant of one specific type, regardless of how much private capital or expertise was waiting to help. That was India's nuclear sector until December 2025, when the SHANTI Act, Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India, finally rewrote the rules.

For decades, India's nuclear programme ran entirely under the Atomic Energy Act of 1962, which reserved nuclear power generation as a state monopoly, and the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act of 2010, whose Section 17(b) let a plant operator sue its equipment suppliers after any accident. That single liability clause, meant to protect victims, ended up deterring both foreign reactor manufacturers and any private Indian company from ever seriously considering entering the sector, since no supplier wanted open-ended liability exposure for equipment it did not itself operate.

The SHANTI Act replaces both older laws with a single, unified framework, and does two things at once. It opens the door for private companies and joint ventures to build, own, operate and eventually decommission nuclear power plants, ending sixty years of state-only ownership. And it reforms the supplier liability regime to align more closely with the international Convention on Supplementary Compensation, capping and clarifying supplier exposure in a way meant to finally make Indian nuclear projects insurable and financeable on terms global reactor makers and private investors can actually accept.

The ambition behind the law is explicit and large. India's nuclear capacity stood at roughly 8.8 GW when the Act passed, and the government has set a target of 22 GW by 2032 and 100 GW by 2047, a more than tenfold increase that would be structurally impossible to fund and build through the state-only model the Atomic Energy Act had enforced since 1962.

Whenever a private Indian conglomerate or a foreign reactor manufacturer is reported discussing a new nuclear power project in India for the first time, the SHANTI Act is the specific legal change that made that conversation possible at all, a door that had remained firmly, deliberately shut for the entire six decades before it.