Why SHANTI Bill is A Troubling Step Backwards for India's Nuclear Goals

The new nuclear bill does not improve efficiency; it is institutionalised irresponsibility.

The most consequential change under SHANTI is the effective dismantling of supplier liability

(Photo: Kamran Akhter/The Quint)

The SHANTI Bill, 2025-standing for the ‘Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India’ is pitched as a practical reform overdue to open India’s nuclear sector to private investment that will meet its growing energy needs. Yet, when the rhetoric is set aside, the bill carries a far more serious consequence. It restructures India’s nuclear laws in a way that permits nuclear risk to linger long after legal responsibility has run its course. 

This is not a general critique of nuclear power, let alone one of private participation per se. It is a critique of the core function of law, namely to ensure that responsibility endures for so long as does the danger it governs. Measured against that standard, SHANTI represents a troubling step backward. 

Nuclear Risk Does Not End When Companies Do 

Most areas of economic law work on the assumption that actors are transient: companies are formed and wound up, contracts are initiated and then terminated, insurers arrive and depart. Nuclear risk runs counter to such a model. Radiation exposure, environmental contamination, radioactive waste-all these develop according to timeframes reckoned in decades and centuries rather than balance sheets or licensing cycles. 

India’s original nuclear framework recognized this reality from the very beginning. The Atomic Energy Act of 1962 kept nuclear power under state control because, besides reasons of a strategic nature, only the State is able to maintain continuous responsibility. Governments change, but the State does not disappear or walk away. 

SHANTI rejects this logic. By allowing private participation across the nuclear value chain-from construction to operation to decommissioning, the bill brings in actors whose legal existence is inherently short-term into an industry whose risks are enduring over the long-term. The Bill offers no legal architecture to bridge this mismatch. 

Liability caps make the problem worse. Once liability is capped, injury beyond the cap stops being a legal failure, it becomes an accepted spillover cost. In effect, the law anticipates disaster and plans not for full accountability, but for orderly abandonment. When damage exceeds the cap, responsibility silently shifts to the State and, ultimately, to the public. 

This is not efficiency; it is institutionalised irresponsibility. 

From Absolute Liability to Engineered Impunity 

The most consequential change under SHANTI is the effective dismantling of supplier liability. Designers and manufacturers of nuclear equipment are shielded even when defects originate in design or fabrication. Liability is channelled solely to operators and strictly limited in amount. 

This directly undermines a settled principle of Indian environmental jurisprudence: enterprises engaged in hazardous activities must bear the full cost of harm they create. The doctrine of absolute liability exists precisely because certain risks are too severe to be negotiated away through contracts or insurance. 

SHANTI reverses this logic. It converts nuclear accidents into actuarial events, pre-priced, insured, and legally contained.

This has profound consequences. When worst-case harm is legally capped, safety ceases to be a non-negotiable duty and becomes a cost-benefit calculation. 

Even more troubling is what the Bill does not say. SHANTI is largely silent on criminal liability. There is no clear framework addressing criminal consequences for gross negligence, falsification of safety data, or deliberate suppression of accident reports. In a sector where catastrophic harm is foreseeable, this silence is not neutral. It communicates that failure will be managed financially, not punished legally. 

This raises serious Constitutional concerns. Article 21 imposes a positive obligation on the State to protect life and health. A law that knowingly limits compensation far below foreseeable harm effectively accepts loss of life and environmental destruction as permissible costs of development. That is a profound shift in constitutional values. 

Waste, Decommissioning, & Burden Shifted to the Unborn 

The most glaring omission in SHANTI concerns radioactive waste and decommissioning. The Bill does not clearly assign long-term responsibility for managing spent fuel, radioactive waste, or dismantling reactors at the end of their operational life. Nor does it mandate fully funded, bankruptcy-proof mechanisms to cover these costs. 

This omission is not technical; it is ethical. Radioactive waste remains hazardous for tens of thousands of years. No private company, and no insurance market, can realistically guarantee responsibility over such timelines. By failing to legislate durable responsibility, SHANTI pushes the problem forward in time onto future governments and future citizens who had no role in creating it. 

Indian courts have repeatedly recognised intergenerational equity as part of environmental protection. Law is meant to safeguard those who cannot yet speak. SHANTI does the opposite. It allows present-day benefits to be secured while future harm remains legally unanchored. 

The same pattern appears in labour and regulatory design. Privatisation almost inevitably leads to greater reliance on contract labour, weaker safety protections, and reduced transparency. In the nuclear sector, these are not marginal risks. Yet, SHANTI offers no robust framework for long-term health monitoring, occupational disease compensation, or worker protection. 

Regulatory reform under the Bill is similarly thin. While statutory status is granted to the regulator, real independence remains absent. The same executive driving nuclear expansion retains the power to override regulatory decisions. Separation between promoter and regulator a basic requirement in high-risk industries is weakened rather than strengthened. 

A Law Built on Legal Amnesia 

The SHANTI Bill does more than reform India's nuclear sector; it remodels how power, risk, and responsibility relate to one another. It accelerates investment even as it weakens accountability, expands capacity even as it limits consequences, and aspires for growth without preparing for failure. 

Nuclear energy is a legal regime that must be premised on memory on remembering past devastation, envisioning continuing damage and staying vigilant throughout the duration of the risk as accountability is required.

SHANTI is based on amnesia; once liability is limited, so too is accountability.

But it isn't. When the law ends before the danger does, what follows isn't development but abandonment-neatly tucked into statute. 

(Akhil Yadav is a law student at Gujarat National law University with an interest in constitutional law and public policy. Nishant Jain is a student at Gujarat National Law University, Gandhinagar. This is an opinion piece. Views expressed are the author's own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)