SHANTI and the evolution of India's regulatory philosophy

SHANTI's significance lies less in its immediate impact on reactor capacity and more in how it redefines the relationship between the state, markets, and high-consequence technological risk.

- ADITYA SINHA

Regulatory systems are ultimately theories of risk. They encode assumptions about who may bear it, how it should be priced, and which institutions can be trusted to manage it.

For much of independent India's history, nuclear governance rested on a single premise: catastrophic risk must be contained through state monopoly and legal exceptionalism. The Sustainable Harnessing of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India (SHANTI) Act, 2025 marks a deliberate departure from this premise. Its significance lies less in its immediate impact on reactor capacity and more in how it redefines the relationship between the state, markets, and high-consequence technological risk.

The Statement of Objects and Reasons (SOR) makes this shift explicit when it acknowledges that India's legacy legal framework had become a constraint on clean-energy expansion, private participation, and timely capacity addition. That acknowledgement is philosophically important. It recognises that the problem was not ambition or capability, but institutional design.

The Atomic Energy Act of 1962 reflected a distinctly postwar regulatory philosophy in which sovereignty was equated with ownership and centralised command. Safety, secrecy, and strategic autonomy were pursued by concentrating all operational, financial, and technological responsibility within a single public entity, leaving little room for institutional pluralism or external oversight. This framework assumed that dispersing activity across multiple actors would inevitably weaken control, increase security risks, and dilute accountability. As a result, monopoly was treated not merely as an administrative choice, but as an essential condition for governing a technology perceived to be uniquely dangerous and politically sensitive.