The Atomic Energy Act 1962 did something no other Indian statute of its generation attempted in quite the same form. It took an entire field of science, industry and strategic policy and placed it, by a single operative provision, in the hands of one actor. Section 3 declared that the Central Government would have power to produce, develop, use and dispose of atomic energy, to carry out research into it, to manufacture the substances and articles the field required, and to control the production and use of the energy itself. Every later question in Indian nuclear law, from who may mine uranium to who may read a document about a reactor, begins as a question about that vesting and about the machinery Parliament built around it. A reader who understands the vesting, and who understands the strange institutional gap at the centre of the framework, understands the Act.

The gap is this. The body responsible for the safety of India’s nuclear installations, the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, was created in 1983 by an executive order issued under a delegated power in the Act. It was not created by the Act itself, and it was not created by any other statute. It reported into the same atomic energy establishment whose facilities it inspected, and it depended on that establishment for money and staff. The Comptroller and Auditor General recorded the consequences in a performance audit in 2012. Parliament was asked to cure the position by a Bill introduced in 2011, and the Bill lapsed in 2014 without being enacted. The position therefore persisted for over four decades, until legislation enacted in December 2025 replaced the whole framework and conferred statutory status on the regulator. That sequence, a defect identified, diagnosed, legislated for, abandoned and then addressed after forty two years, is the longest running instance in this series of a known institutional problem left unremedied, and it is the centrepiece of this article.

The article is a legal and institutional account. It states what the Act said, how its controls worked, who was permitted to do what under it, and how the framework ended. It makes no claim about the safety of any facility, and it adopts no position on whether nuclear power should expand or contract. Those questions are argued elsewhere by people who hold them strongly and sincerely on every side, and nothing in a statute pillar would be advanced by borrowing their conclusions. What a statute pillar can do is fix the legal record precisely, because a surprising amount of published writing about this Act gets the legal record wrong: the regulator is described as a statutory body, which it never was under this Act; the amendment of 2015 is described as opening the sector to private capital, which it did not; and the replacing legislation of 2025 is described in terms that outrun what its text, as enacted, can bear. Each of those errors is corrected in its place below.

One boundary should be marked at the outset. The Act governed control, secrecy, licensing and safety machinery. The question of who pays when a nuclear incident causes damage, and on what terms, was governed by a separate statute enacted in 2010, and the controversy over that statute is owned by the article on the nuclear liability framework, to which this pillar defers entirely. Liability appears here only at the level of headline, where the replacing legislation makes it unavoidable, and no position on it is taken or retried.

The constitutional footing and the 1948 predecessor

Parliament’s competence to enact the Atomic Energy Act 1962 rests on the Union List entry covering atomic energy and the mineral resources necessary for its production. That entry places both the energy and the minerals it feeds on within the exclusive legislative field of the Union, which is why the Indian nuclear framework is a central framework from end to end: there is no state list foothold for atomic minerals comparable to the shared ground that exists for ordinary mines and minerals, and no state legislature could have constructed a rival licensing regime for uranium. The constitutional design and the statutory design match. A field Parliament regarded as indivisible was assigned to the level of government that alone could legislate on it, and the statute then assigned the whole of it to the Central Government as operator, licensor and controller.

The 1962 Act was not the first word. An Atomic Energy Act had been enacted in 1948, in the first year of independence, and the institutional foundations were laid alongside it: the Atomic Energy Commission was constituted in 1948 and the Department of Atomic Energy in 1954, with Homi Jehangir Bhabha as the founding figure of both the scientific programme and its administrative architecture. The three stage programme associated with Bhabha, proceeding from uranium fuelled heavy water reactors through plutonium fuelled fast breeders to a thorium based third stage, supplied the policy logic within which the law operated: a country with modest uranium reserves and very large thorium reserves would need State control of the entire fuel cycle if the programme’s stages were to be connected, and the law supplied that control. The 1962 Act repealed and replaced the 1948 statute, and Section 32 of the 1962 Act carried out the repeal. What changed between the two statutes was less the direction than the completeness: by 1962 the framework covered discovery, mining, acquisition, production, use, disclosure, inventions, electricity and offences in a single code, administered by a single department, under a single vesting provision.

The preamble of the 1962 Act states its object as providing for the development, control and use of atomic energy for the welfare of the people of India and for other peaceful purposes. The pairing in that sentence is the whole statute in miniature. Development and control are named together, in one breath, as purposes of equal standing, and the Act never separates them. The same government that was charged with developing atomic energy was charged with controlling it, and the same department that promoted the programme housed the machinery that policed it. Much of what follows, including the regulator question, is a working out of that original pairing across six decades.

Which provision gave the Central Government its control of atomic energy?

Section 3 vested the production, development, use and disposal of atomic energy in the Central Government, together with research, the manufacture of prescribed and radioactive substances and of articles required for the field, and control over production and use, exercisable directly or through authorities, corporations and government companies.

Section 3: the general powers and what they swallowed

Section 3 is the operative heart of the Act, and it repays slow reading. Subject to the provisions of the Act, the Central Government was given power to produce, develop, use and dispose of atomic energy either by itself or through any authority or corporation established by it or a government company, and to carry out research in any matter connected with atomic energy. It was given power to manufacture or otherwise produce any prescribed substance or radioactive substance, and any article required for the production or use of atomic energy. It was given power to control the production and use of atomic energy, and the later sections of the Act are, in substance, the instruments of that control: licensing, information powers, inspection, acquisition, secrecy and prohibition.

Three features of the drafting deserve attention. First, the vesting is of the activity, not merely of a licensing jurisdiction. In most Indian regulatory statutes the State stands outside an activity conducted by others and regulates it; under Section 3 the State was itself the actor, and private participation was not regulated so much as absent, possible only where the Act affirmatively made room for it, which in the field of generation it did not. Second, the delegation route was built into the vesting itself. The words authorising action through an authority, a corporation or a government company are what allowed the operating structure of the programme, research centres, public sector undertakings and eventually the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited, to be constructed without returning to Parliament for a new statute each time an institution was created. Third, the definition of a government company did the quiet gatekeeping. Section 2 defined it, in its original form, as a company in which not less than fifty one per cent of the paid up share capital was held by the Central Government. The consequence was that the corporate route into atomic energy was open only to companies the Centre majority owned, and the amendment history of the Act, examined later in this article, is largely a history of that definition being adjusted at its edges while its gatekeeping function was preserved.

The remaining definitions in Section 2 built the vocabulary of control. Atomic energy meant energy released from atomic nuclei, including by fission and fusion. Fissile material covered uranium 233, uranium 235, plutonium and any material containing them, together with anything the Central Government declared to be fissile. Prescribed substance and prescribed equipment were categories the Central Government filled by notification, which meant the perimeter of the controlled field could be widened or narrowed by executive act without amendment. Uranium and thorium compounds and elements sat at the centre of the prescribed category. The structure is worth noticing because it recurs throughout the Act: Parliament fixed the architecture and the prohibitions, and left the lists, the forms and much of the threshold detail to notification and rule. A statute of thirty two sections thereby governed a field of enormous technical extent, and the real texture of the control lived in the subordinate instruments, a point that matters when the rules architecture and the regulator are considered below.

Situating the Act in its field also situates the reader. Atomic energy law is one province of the larger body of Indian infrastructure and energy law, whose map is drawn in the guide to infrastructure laws in India, and the electricity produced under this Act entered the general electricity framework considered in that guide. This pillar owns the atomic statute itself and leaves the map to the guide.

Discovery, minerals and compulsory acquisition: Sections 4 to 13

The Act’s control began at the ground. Section 4 required notification of discovery: a person who found uranium or thorium in the course of working minerals, or who discovered such material otherwise, came under a duty to report it, and the discoverer of an unknown mineral deposit faced obligations to inform the Central Government and to refrain from parting with the material except as directed. The purpose was informational before it was anything else. A State that intended to monopolise a fuel cycle first had to know where the fuel was, and the notification duty converted every mine operator and every prospector in the country into a reporting point for the two elements the programme depended on.

Section 5 then placed control over the mining and concentration of substances containing uranium in the Central Government. Where land contained uranium bearing material, the Government could control the working of the minerals, and the working of mines containing such substances was drawn into the central scheme rather than left to the ordinary mining lease structure that governed other minerals. Section 6 governed the disposal of uranium: material extracted had to be disposed of as the Central Government directed, with compensation principles supplied by Section 21 and with the value of uranium in its natural state excluded from the computation in the manner the Act prescribed. Read together, Sections 4, 5 and 6 form a closed circuit. Discover and report; mine only under central control; dispose only as the Centre directs. No lawful private market in uranium ore or concentrate could exist inside that circuit, and none did.

Sections 7 and 8 gave the control its investigative instruments. Section 7 empowered the Central Government to obtain information regarding materials, plant and processes from persons engaged in work the Act touched, and Section 8 conferred powers of entry and inspection on authorised officers. Section 9 authorised the Government to do work for discovering minerals, entering land and conducting the operations that prospecting required. These are the unglamorous provisions on which a control regime actually runs: a prohibition without information powers is a hope, and a licensing system without inspection is a formality, and the Act supplied both instruments at the outset.

The acquisition provisions completed the scheme. Section 10 empowered the Central Government to compulsorily acquire exclusive rights to work minerals in land where that course was required for the purposes of the Act, and Section 11 empowered compulsory acquisition of prescribed substances, minerals, equipment and plant themselves. Section 11A, inserted by a later amendment, declared for the removal of doubts that such compulsory acquisition was not to be deemed a sale for any purpose. Section 12 addressed compensation where a mine was compulsorily acquired, and Section 21 laid down the general principles relating to the payment of compensation under the Act, including the matters to which regard was to be had and the deliberate exclusion of the natural state value of uranium from the reckoning. Section 13 provided for the novation of certain contracts, so that where an undertaking or its rights passed to the Central Government, existing contracts could be carried over into the new arrangement rather than collapsing. The design is characteristic of the statute as a whole. The powers are wide, the compensation code is internal to the Act rather than borrowed from the general land acquisition law of the day, and the exclusions in the compensation principles favour the acquiring State in ways the Act states openly rather than conceals.

Could a private person mine uranium under the 1962 Act?

No lawful private uranium mining existed under the framework. Discovery had to be notified under Section 4, mining and concentration of uranium bearing substances stood under Central Government control under Section 5, and disposal of uranium followed central direction under Section 6, within a closed circuit the Act designed.

Section 14: control over production and use, and the licence

If Section 3 was the vesting, Section 14 was the gate. It provided for control over the production and use of atomic energy, and its mechanism was prohibition backed by licence: no person could produce atomic energy, acquire, produce, possess, use, dispose of or transport prescribed substances or prescribed equipment, or carry on the connected operations the section specified, except under and in accordance with a licence granted by the Central Government. The licensing requirement is the provision through which the abstract monopoly of Section 3 touched ordinary conduct. A hospital acquiring a radioactive source for treatment, a laboratory holding prescribed equipment, an industrial user of a radioactive substance in a measuring instrument: each stood, in principle, within the perimeter of a section that made the activity lawful only on licence, with the detail of categories, exemptions and conditions supplied by rules and by the regulatory machinery described later in this article.

Section 14 also carried the provision that made the government company definition operational. An amendment inserted a safeguard under which a licence granted to a government company stood cancelled if the licensee ceased to be a government company, with the assets vesting in the Central Government free from liability and the Government required to take the measures necessary for the safe operation of the plant and the disposal of the nuclear material. The drafting tells the reader exactly what the licensing system was for. The licence was not a market access instrument that a company could carry with it into private ownership. It was an incident of public ownership, drafted so that the moment public ownership ended, the licence ended with it and the plant returned to the Centre with a statutory duty of safe operation attached. When the amendment of 2015 later widened the government company definition, it worked through this section as well as through Section 2, because widening who could hold the licence required amending the provision that cancelled it.

The remaining control provisions of the middle of the Act can be taken shortly because their functions are plain. Section 15 empowered the Central Government to requisition substances from which uranium or plutonium could be extracted, where the needs of the programme required it. Section 16 placed control over radioactive substances: the Government could regulate their production, possession, use, disposal and transport, and the rules framed under the Act built the detailed regime of authorisations for radiation applications in medicine, industry, agriculture and research that touched far more citizens than the power programme ever did. Section 17 contained the special provisions as to safety, empowering the Central Government to frame the safety framework for work with prescribed substances and radioactive material, including the measures for the protection of workers and the public that the regulatory board would later administer in practice. Section 19 provided for the prevention of entry into prohibited areas, the physical perimeter of the secrecy regime whose informational perimeter is the subject of the next section.

Section 18: restricted information and the transparency question

Section 18 restricted the disclosure of information. The Central Government could, by order, declare information relating to a plant that existed or was under construction, to a process carried on or proposed in such a plant, or to prescribed substances and their production, to be restricted information, and disclosure of restricted information otherwise than as the provision permitted was an offence under the Act’s penal provisions. The section also protected documents and information connected with atomic energy research and the programme from the ordinary channels of compulsion and publication that apply to other fields of government activity. The effect, stated neutrally, was that a substantial part of the sector stood outside the ordinary operation of the transparency law. When the Right to Information Act was enacted in 2005, its general scheme of disclosure met, in this sector, both the exemption for information whose disclosure would prejudicially affect the security and strategic interests of the State and the older statutory wall of Section 18, and the jurisprudence on the application of the transparency statute to the nuclear establishment was argued at that meeting point. The framework of the transparency statute itself, its exemptions and its overrides, is set out in the guide to the Right to Information Act; this pillar records only what Section 18 did to the ground on which that framework had to operate. For reporters working in a sector built on restricted information, how journalists use VaultBook to protect sources describes the source protection discipline such reporting demands.

The argument about Section 18 has two genuine sides, and the stance of this series requires both to be stated at strength. The case for the restriction, as its defenders make it, is that atomic energy information is not ordinary administrative information. The same knowledge that describes a civilian fuel cycle can describe the material base of a weapons programme, India conducted its programme for most of this period outside the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and the control of information about prescribed substances, plant design and process detail was, on this view, a strategic necessity rather than an administrative preference. A secrecy provision drawn widely is the simplest means of ensuring that sensitive knowledge does not move, and the costs of movement in this field are not the costs of embarrassment but of proliferation.

The case against the breadth of the restriction, as its critics make it, is that safety information is the one category the public living near an installation has the strongest interest in holding, and a provision that treats information about a plant as restricted without distinguishing weapon relevant detail from the radiological and operational information that bears on neighbours sweeps the second category up with the first. On this view the question is not whether secrecy should exist in the sector, which few serious critics deny, but whether the line was drawn by category of information or by institution, and whether an institution deciding for itself what may be known about it is the right line drawer. Both arguments were live throughout the life of the Act, and the balance the replacing legislation strikes between them is a question its text, once its rules are framed and tested, will answer in practice; this article records the question rather than anticipating the answer.

Section 20: the invention provisions and the patent bar

Section 20 contained the special provisions as to inventions, and it operated in two directions at once. In one direction it was an acquisition provision: where an invention appeared to the Central Government to be likely to be useful for or to relate to the production, control, use or disposal of atomic energy or the prospecting, mining, extraction, production, physical treatment, chemical treatment, utilisation or waste management of prescribed or radioactive substances, the Government could acquire the exclusive rights in the invention, on the compensation principles the Act supplied, in much the same spirit as Sections 10 and 11 acquired minerals and plant. In the other direction it was a prohibition. No patent was to be granted for an invention which in the opinion of the Central Government was likely to be useful for or related to atomic energy in those respects, and applications touching the field were routed for the Government’s opinion before grant.

The prohibition corresponded to the exclusion written into the patents statute itself, under which inventions relating to atomic energy are excluded from patentability, and the two provisions were read together throughout the life of the Act: the atomic statute supplied the policy and the governmental opinion, and the patents statute supplied the bar at the point of grant. The exclusion, its history and its place in the patent system are owned by the article on the Patents Act, and this pillar confines itself to the atomic statute’s side of the arrangement. Two consequences of the bar are worth recording here because they shaped the sector the Act governed. The first is that innovation in the field was channelled into the State system: an inventor outside the establishment faced not a licensing problem but a categorical exclusion, softened only by the acquisition route and its compensation. The second is that the bar was one of the provisions the replacing legislation of 2025 revisited, substituting a qualified permissibility for peaceful uses under a screening mechanism, a change examined with the replacement later in this article. Between 1962 and that change, the position was simple to state and was stated in seed questions across examination papers for decades: inventions relating to atomic energy could not be patented in India.

Section 22: electricity, and the operating companies

Section 22 contained the special provisions as to electricity. Control over electricity generated from atomic energy rested with the Central Government, which could authorise persons to produce electricity from atomic energy and prescribe the terms on which such electricity was supplied. The provision mattered because atomic electricity entered the same grid and the same tariff world as electricity from every other source, and the general framework of electricity law, its commissions and its supply obligations, is the subject of the article on the Electricity Act. Section 22 kept the atomic stream administratively separate at its source: the decision to generate, the identity of the generator and the terms of supply began inside the atomic framework and met the general framework downstream.

The operating history under the Act ran through the government company route that Section 3 had built in. For the programme’s first decades the Department of Atomic Energy itself, through its research and industrial units, carried the field. An amendment of the Act in 1987 then addressed the corporate form directly, enabling the Central Government to entrust the owning, establishing and operating of nuclear power stations to a corporation or government company, and the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited was incorporated in 1987 as the operating company for nuclear power. A second public sector company, Bharatiya Nabhikiya Vidyut Nigam Limited, was later established for the fast breeder programme. These two companies, both under the administrative control of the Department of Atomic Energy, were for the rest of the Act’s life the only entities operating nuclear power plants in India, a duopoly of public companies inside a statutory monopoly of the Centre. The scale they reached can be stated with attribution: the Observer Research Foundation’s Energy News Monitor, drawing on official figures, recorded twenty four reactors in operation with a combined installed capacity of 8,780 megawatts in December 2025, roughly three per cent of national electricity generation, against the target of one hundred gigawatts by 2047 that the Nuclear Energy Mission announced in the Union Budget for 2025 to 2026 had set. The distance between those two figures is the factual core of the case for opening the sector, and it is taken up in the argument section below.

Offences, overriding effect, rules and repeal: Sections 24 to 32

The penal provisions of the Act were Sections 24 to 26. Section 24 prescribed offences and penalties: contraventions of the Act’s control provisions, including the licensing requirement of Section 14, the control provisions governing prescribed and radioactive substances, and the disclosure prohibition of Section 18, were punishable with imprisonment extending to five years, or with fine, or with both, and the section reached attempts and abetments as well as completed contraventions. Section 25 dealt with offences by companies, fixing responsibility on the persons in charge of and responsible to the company for the conduct of its business, with the familiar defences of absence of knowledge and due diligence. Section 26 governed cognizance: prosecutions required the previous sanction of the Central Government or an authority it empowered, a filter that kept the criminal process of a secretive sector in governmental hands. The penalty level is worth a moment’s attention. Five years for unlicensed handling of prescribed substances or disclosure of restricted information sat, in the statute book, beside far heavier penalties in other security legislation, and the moderation reflects the Act’s character: it was a control statute for a State monopoly, written when the realistic defendant was a straying insider or an unauthorised experimenter, not an organised adversary, and its enforcement ran in practice through licence, inspection and administrative direction rather than through prosecution.

Section 27 empowered the Central Government to delegate powers conferred and duties imposed by the Act to officers and authorities subordinate to it. The provision reads as boilerplate, and for most of the Act’s life it functioned as boilerplate. Its importance is that it became, in 1983, the legal hook on which the safety regulator was hung, and the centrepiece section below is the story of that use. Section 28 gave the Act overriding effect: its provisions were to have effect notwithstanding anything inconsistent in any other law for the time being in force. Section 29 protected action taken in good faith under the Act from suit and prosecution. Section 30 conferred the rule making power, the source of the subordinate architecture considered in the next section. Section 31 declared the Act binding on the Government, a clause of real significance in a statute whose principal actor was the Government itself, since it subjected the State’s own operations to the Act’s safety and control provisions in terms. Section 32 repealed the Atomic Energy Act of 1948, closing the predecessor framework the 1962 code had replaced.

The rules framed under Section 30 built the working regime. The Atomic Energy (Working of Mines, Minerals and Handling of Prescribed Substances) Rules of 1984 governed the mining end of the circuit that Sections 4 to 6 had closed. The Atomic Energy (Safe Disposal of Radioactive Waste) Rules of 1987 addressed the back end of the fuel cycle. The Atomic Energy (Factories) Rules of 1996 applied factory discipline to the sector’s industrial operations, working alongside Section 23 of the Act, which had applied the Factories Act of 1948 to the sector with the Central Government standing in the place the general statute assigns to state governments. The Atomic Energy (Radiation Protection) Rules of 2004 supplied the authorisation regime for radiation applications across medicine, industry and research. Two features of this architecture matter for the argument that follows. The rules were the Central Government’s own instruments, made under its own section, amendable by notification. And the body that administered much of the safety content of the rules in practice, granting consents and conducting inspections at installations, was a body the Act never mentioned at all.

The regulator without a statute: 1983 to 2025

The Atomic Energy Regulatory Board was constituted on 15 November 1983 by an order of the President of India, issued in exercise of the powers the Central Government held and delegated under the Act, drawing principally on Section 17’s safety provisions and Section 27’s delegation power. The constitution order charged the Board with carrying out the regulatory and safety functions the Act envisaged: framing safety policy, codes and guides, granting consents for installations through their siting, construction, commissioning and operation, and overseeing the radiological protection of workers and the public. The order was an executive instrument. Parliament had not created the Board, had not fixed its composition, its tenure, its budget or its powers in any statute, and could not hold it to account as a statutory authority, because in law it was an authority exercising delegated governmental power and subordinate to the government that had created it.

The structural consequence was recorded from inside the establishment before it was recorded from outside. A. Gopalakrishnan, a former Chairman of the Board itself, argued in published writing over many years that the arrangement made effective regulation impossible in principle: the Board reported to the Atomic Energy Commission, the Chairman of that Commission was the Secretary of the Department of Atomic Energy, and the Department operated the facilities through the companies the Board regulated, so the regulator answered, institutionally, to the head of the regulated programme. The Board depended on the Department for budgetary and administrative support and drew the overwhelming share of its expert committees from the Department’s own institutes and retired personnel. Gopalakrishnan’s verdict on the resulting system was severe, and it carried the weight of a man who had run the Board rather than merely studied it.

The Comptroller and Auditor General converted that insider criticism into an official finding. Its performance audit of the activities of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, Report No. 9 of 2012, tabled in Parliament on 22 August 2012, examined whether the Board had the legal status, authority, independence and mandate a nuclear regulator requires, and answered in terms that left little room for reinterpretation. The audit recorded that the legal status of the Board continued to be that of an authority subordinate to the Central Government, exercising powers delegated to it, and that the absence of a statute meant the jurisdiction, powers and enforcement instruments expected of a regulator, including a graduated scale of penalties for violations, had never been conferred on it in law. It recorded the overlap by which the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and the Secretary of the Department were one person as negating the separation of regulatory and operating functions, and it recorded the Board’s dependence on the Department for budget and administration. The Public Accounts Committee, examining the audit in 2013, added its own criticism, including of the failure to prepare the radiation safety policy the Board’s own constitution order had mandated in 1983. An Integrated Regulatory Review Service mission of the International Atomic Energy Agency, reviewing India’s framework in 2015, recommended in the same direction: that the regulator be separated in law and in fact from the entities whose interests could influence its decisions. Three different instruments of scrutiny, an insider chairman, the national auditor and the international peer review, converged on the same diagnosis across three decades, and the diagnosis was never seriously disputed on its merits by anyone. What did not follow, for most of the period, was a cure.

What powers did the Board exercise over an installation’s life?

It consented to an installation stage by stage, so that siting, construction, commissioning and operation each required its approval, and it framed the safety codes, guides and manuals for the sector, conducted regulatory inspections at installations and oversaw the radiological protection of workers and the public under the constitution order of 1983.

The Bill that lapsed: the Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority Bill 2011

The cure was drafted once. Following the accident at Fukushima in Japan in March 2011, the Prime Minister assured Parliament that the regulatory system would be made autonomous, and the Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority Bill, 2011 was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 7 September 2011 by the Minister of State V. Narayanasamy. The Bill proposed to dissolve the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board and replace it with a statutory Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority, overseen in policy matters by a Council of Nuclear Safety chaired by the Prime Minister, with the Authority empowered to regulate nuclear and radiation safety across the sector, and with an appellate mechanism above it. The Bill was referred to the Department Related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Technology, Environment and Forests, which reported on 6 March 2012 under the chairmanship of T. Subbarami Reddy, recommending among other things a safeguard against governmental interference with the Authority’s exercise of its functions.

The Bill was then not enacted. It remained pending while the Fifteenth Lok Sabha ran its course, and it lapsed on the dissolution of that House in 2014. It was not reintroduced by the succeeding government. The consequence deserves to be stated with precision, because it is the point on which the institutional history turns. Between the introduction of the Bill in 2011 and the replacing legislation of 2025, fourteen years passed in which the defect the Bill had been drafted to cure was a matter of official record: the Auditor General’s report of 2012 was tabled after the Bill was already before Parliament, the Public Accounts Committee reported in 2013, and the international peer review reported in 2015, each addressing a framework whose replacement was already drafted and pending in a drawer. Critics of the Bill itself had argued, in the debate of the time and in the analysis published by PRS Legislative Research, that the draft did not deliver the independence it promised: the Council of Nuclear Safety included the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, who headed the department operating the plants; the search committee arrangements for the Authority’s members ran through governmental hands; facilities could be exempted from the Authority’s jurisdiction on defence and security grounds and regulated by bodies the government itself created, with the extent of parliamentary oversight over them unclear; and the Authority was to be bound by governmental directions on questions of policy, with the government deciding finally what counted as policy. Those criticisms matter to a fair account, because they establish that enacting the 2011 Bill would not by itself have ended the argument. But they do not alter the arithmetic of the lapse. A flawed statutory regulator would still have been a statutory regulator, with a legal personality, a defined jurisdiction and a parliamentary account to render. What the sector had instead, for eleven further years, was the executive order of 1983.

The courts and the installations

Litigation under the framework clustered at two points. The first was siting and safety, where challenges to particular installations asked the courts to halt or condition projects on the adequacy of the safety and environmental processes behind them. The governing instance is the litigation over the Kudankulam plant in Tamil Nadu, which reached the Supreme Court in G. Sundarrajan v. Union of India, decided in 2013. The Court declined to substitute its own assessment of nuclear safety for that of the expert bodies charged with it, treated the regulatory clearances and the conditions attached to them as the operative safeguards, directed compliance with the environmental and safety conditions on which the clearances rested, and allowed the plant to proceed. The proposition the case stands for, and the proposition later challenges met, is a division of labour the courts stated openly: the scientific assessment of reactor safety belongs to the regulator and the technical establishment; the judicial function is to ensure that the processes the law prescribes were followed and that the conditions imposed were honoured. A court applying that division of labour could police legality without pretending to competence in reactor physics, and the price of the arrangement is equally visible in the record: where the regulator’s own independence is the defect, a court that defers to the regulator defers to the defect. This article describes no facility’s safety and reaches no view on any installation; the point is jurisdictional, and it is the point the litigation actually decided.

The second point was information. Requests and litigation under the transparency statute tested how far the exemptions for security and strategic interests, working with Section 18 of the atomic statute, would reach into the sector’s records, and the contests were fought document by document: safety review material, correspondence about installations, and information touching prescribed substances and plant processes each had to be placed on one side or the other of a line the statutes drew in general words. The cumulative effect is more important than any single ruling. In most sectors of Indian government, the transparency statute shifted the default from secrecy to disclosure and put the burden on the withholding authority. In the atomic sector, the older statutory wall and the breadth of the security exemption meant the default remained substantially where the 1962 Act had put it, and the practical operation of the sector stayed correspondingly closed. The replacing legislation redrew parts of this ground as well, and its settlement of the information question, like its settlement of the liability question, is a matter for examination of its working text and rules rather than for anticipation here.

Could the courts halt a plant on safety grounds under this framework?

In practice the courts policed process rather than assessment. In the Kudankulam litigation the Supreme Court declined to substitute its judgment on reactor safety for the expert regulator’s, required compliance with the clearance conditions imposed, and allowed the project to proceed, a division of labour later challenges consistently met.

The case for the closed framework, stated at strength

The closed framework was not an oversight. It was a considered design, defended by the establishment that ran it on grounds that deserve to be stated as its defenders state them. Atomic energy is inseparable, in material and in knowledge, from the base of a weapons programme. The same prescribed substances, the same enrichment and reprocessing knowledge and much of the same plant serve both, and a legal order that disperses control of that material among private actors multiplies the points at which control can fail. India’s position sharpened the point: for nearly the whole life of the Act, India stood outside the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, conducted its programme under the shadow of technology denial regimes that followed its 1974 test, and treated assured control of fissile material and sensitive information as a strategic necessity rather than a regulatory preference. On this view, a statutory monopoly in a single accountable department was the simplest and most reliable means of ensuring that the material and the knowledge remained under State control, and the breadth of Section 18’s secrecy and Section 20’s patent bar were features of the same design: nothing about the programme was to leak through markets, through publications or through patent filings, because in this field a filing is a disclosure. The separation of the civilian and strategic programmes, undertaken when India negotiated its civil nuclear cooperation arrangements and placed designated civilian facilities under international safeguards, is on this view the proof that the design was discriminating rather than indiscriminate: the State distinguished what could be opened from what could not, facility by facility, and kept the statute closed because the statute governed both.

The case for opening, stated at strength

The case for opening, as its proponents made it across the same decades, begins from the capacity record. Successive official targets for nuclear generation were set and missed by wide margins for half a century, and the installed base at the end of the framework’s life stood, on the figures recorded earlier in this article, at 8,780 megawatts against a mission target of one hundred gigawatts by 2047. The proponents’ argument is that a capital intensive technology with very long construction periods cannot be built at the required pace from departmental budgets and two public companies alone, that private capital and private construction capacity are the standard instruments every other large electricity technology in India uses, and that the monopoly therefore priced itself: the choice was never between a State programme and a private programme in the abstract, but between a small State programme and a larger mixed one. The regulatory limb of the case is the one the official record supplies. A regulator created by the operator’s own department, funded by it, staffed from it and reporting to its head could not command the public confidence on which siting decisions in a democracy ultimately depend, and the string of official findings to that effect, from the Board’s own former chairman through the Auditor General to the international peer review, meant the independence question did not need to be argued from first principles by the opening’s proponents: it needed only to be cited. On the technology limb, separation had already done the work the closed framework claimed only closure could do: once civilian facilities stood under safeguards and the strategic programme stood apart, the argument that civilian generation had to remain a monopoly to protect the strategic base lost its factual premise, and what remained was a habit of institutional design surviving the conditions that had justified it. The replacing legislation of 2025 is, in substance, the enactment of this case, with the safeguards its drafters judged necessary, and it is examined next on its own terms.

The amendment of 2015: a gate widened by one notch

The Atomic Energy (Amendment) Act, 2015, enacted as Act 5 of 2016, was the last amendment of substance to the 1962 framework, and it is regularly misdescribed, so its exact content matters. Before the amendment, a government company was a company in which not less than fifty one per cent of the paid up share capital was held by the Central Government. A joint venture between the Nuclear Power Corporation and another public sector undertaking, in which the Centre’s direct holding would fall below that line, therefore could not qualify, however public its ownership in substance. The amendment substituted a widened definition with two limbs: the original limb of fifty one per cent central holding, and a new limb covering a company whose whole paid up share capital was held by one or more such government companies and whose articles empowered the Central Government to constitute and reconstitute its board of directors. The amendment worked through Sections 2 and 14, and it carried the licensing safeguard with it: the licensee’s status as a government company on the widened definition remained the condition of the licence, and ceasing to hold that status cancelled it.

The object, stated in the amendment’s own Statement of Objects and Reasons, was funding. Joint ventures between the operating company and other public sector undertakings, the National Thermal Power Corporation being the standing example, whose joint venture with the operating company had been agreed in principle years earlier and was approved in corporate form in 2024, would widen the pool of public capital available to a programme whose expansion the departmental budget could not carry. What the amendment did not do is as important as what it did. It admitted no private equity. It admitted no foreign equity. It changed nothing about the regulator, the secrecy provisions or the patent bar. A reader who encounters the claim that the 2015 amendment opened Indian nuclear power to private participation is reading an error, and the error matters because it collapses the distinction between 2015 and 2025 on which the history of the replacement depends. In 2015 the gate was widened by exactly one notch, from the Centre alone to the Centre’s companies collectively, with central control of the board written into the new limb as the price. The monopoly changed its internal organisation. It did not change its character.

The replacement: the SHANTI Act 2025

The replacement arrived quickly at the end of 2025, and it is described here from its enacted record, with the caution the subject requires: provisions summarised below are stated at the level the published record of the Act supports, and the detailed working of the new framework depends on rules and regulations that the Department of Atomic Energy placed in draft for public consultation between 14 August and 4 September 2026, so any account of the framework in operation should be checked against the text as finally framed. The Union Budget for 2025 to 2026 had announced a Nuclear Energy Mission directed at one hundred gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2047 and had foreshadowed amendment of the atomic energy and liability framework to admit private participation. The Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India Bill, 2025, known by its acronym as the SHANTI Bill, was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 15 December 2025 by the Minister of State Jitendra Singh, passed by the Lok Sabha on 17 December 2025 and by the Rajya Sabha on 18 December 2025, and received the assent of the President on 20 December 2025, becoming Act 39 of 2025 and coming into force on 21 December 2025. It repealed both the Atomic Energy Act, 1962 and the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, 2010, replacing the two statutes with a single framework.

The changes that concern this pillar, stated without assessment, are these. Private participation in nuclear power generation became permissible under licence: Indian companies, including companies formed with public sector participation, may build, own, operate and decommission nuclear facilities under the Act’s licensing regime, and foreign investment in nuclear projects is capped at forty nine per cent, with companies incorporated outside India not themselves eligible as licensees. The operating company’s monopoly ended. A set of strategic activities remained reserved to the Central Government and its entities, including the mining of uranium and thorium, enrichment, isotopic separation, reprocessing of spent fuel, high level waste management and heavy water production, so that the fuel cycle’s sensitive stages stayed inside the perimeter the 1962 Act had drawn around the whole field. The Atomic Energy Regulatory Board was placed on a statutory footing by the Act itself, established as a body accountable to Parliament, with power to frame safety standards, set radiation limits, grant the safety authorisations the new regime requires, conduct inspections and issue binding directions: the cure drafted in 2011 and lost in 2014 arrived, in altered form, as part of a general replacement rather than as a standalone statute. The patent position changed with it: the Act’s provisions on inventions, read with the amendment it made to the Patents Act, moved the field from the categorical bar of Section 20 of the 1962 Act to a qualified permissibility for inventions in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, subject to screening and to the exclusion of the reserved strategic activities. And the liability framework of 2010 was replaced within the same statute, a change recorded here at headline level only, because the controversy over operator and supplier liability is owned by the liability article in this series and is not retried in this pillar. Dispute resolution and claims machinery formed part of the new Act’s design.

Two things should be said about how to read this replacement from inside a pillar devoted to the statute it repealed. The first is that the repeal does not retire the 1962 Act’s concepts. Prescribed substances, licensing, the reservation of sensitive stages and the safety authorisation all descend from the older framework’s vocabulary, and a reader who has worked through the 1962 Act holds most of the grammar of the new one. The second is that the replacement’s largest single change is institutional rather than commercial. Private capital could have been admitted by amending half a dozen provisions, as 2015 had shown. What could not be done by amendment of the old Act was the regulator, because the old Act had never contained the regulator at all. It took a replacement statute to give the Board a legal existence, and the forty two year interval between an executive order and a statute is the measure of the change.

Who could do what under the two frameworks

The table records, activity by activity, who was permitted to act under the 1962 framework and the provision that governed the permission, against the position under the replacing Act of 2025. The final column is expressly provisional: it states the position under the SHANTI Act as enacted and reported, and it requires verification against the Act’s rules and regulations as finally framed before any operational reliance is placed on it.

Activity	Who was permitted under the 1962 framework	Provision	Position under the replacement (requires verification)
Mining and processing of atomic minerals	The Central Government and its entities, under central control of uranium bearing minerals	Sections 4, 5 and 6	Reserved to the Central Government and its entities
Manufacture of prescribed substances	The Central Government, its authorities and government companies; others only on licence	Sections 3 and 14	Permitted under licence within the Act’s licensing regime
Generation of nuclear power	Government companies only, in practice the two departmental operating companies	Sections 3, 14 and 22	Open to licensed Indian companies, with foreign investment capped at forty nine per cent
Operation of a reactor	The licensed government company operator	Sections 14 and 22	Licensed operators, subject to safety authorisation by the statutory regulator
Supply of equipment	Suppliers to the programme under governmental contract and control	Sections 3 and 14	Open to private and foreign suppliers under the licensing and contract framework
Safety regulation	The Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, created by executive order of 1983	Sections 17 and 27, by delegation	The Board established by statute, accountable to Parliament

The institutional architecture the vesting built

A vesting provision is only as real as the institutions that exercise it, and the architecture Section 3 authorised grew in layers over the Act’s life. At the apex stood the Atomic Energy Commission, constituted in 1948 and reconstituted thereafter, the policy body of the programme, chaired throughout the relevant period by the Secretary of the Department of Atomic Energy. Beneath it, the Department, created in 1954 and placed directly under the Prime Minister, was the administrative owner of the entire field: research, industry, mining, generation and, through the delegation that created the Board, regulation. The research spine was the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre at Trombay and the national laboratories and institutes the Department maintained for reactor engineering, fuel chemistry, materials and radiation science. The industrial spine was a family of public sector undertakings, each a government company within Section 2’s definition and each a licensee or instrument of the Department: the Uranium Corporation of India Limited mined and milled uranium ore; Indian Rare Earths Limited worked the monazite sands that carried thorium; the Nuclear Fuel Complex fabricated fuel; the Heavy Water Board produced heavy water; Electronics Corporation of India Limited supplied instrumentation and control systems; and from 1987 the Nuclear Power Corporation operated the power stations, joined later by Bharatiya Nabhikiya Vidyut Nigam Limited for the fast breeder line.

The legal significance of that architecture is easy to miss because it looks like ordinary public administration. Every entity in it held its position through the Act’s own devices: incorporation as a government company under the definition, entrustment of the Centre’s powers under Section 3, licensing under Section 14, and direction through departmental control. There was no point in the structure at which an outsider acquired a right against the establishment, and no point at which a market test applied. Procurement, fuel supply, waste management and operation formed a single closed economy whose prices, priorities and information flows were internal decisions. Defenders of the design reply, with force, that this was the only architecture compatible with the strategic programme and with the technology denial conditions under which the programme was built: a country refused foreign reactors and foreign fuel for three decades had to be able to make everything itself, inside one accountable system, and did. Critics reply that a closed economy of this kind cannot benchmark itself, that its costs and schedules are whatever the system reports them to be, and that the capacity record examined earlier in this article is the predictable output of the architecture rather than a series of accidents within it. The statute itself is neutral between those readings. What the statute did, indisputably, is make the architecture lawful, complete and self contained, and place the single exception to its closure, the safety regulator, outside its own text.

Amendments of 1986 and 1987: the code adjusted, not opened

The two amendments of the nineteen eighties show the framework being repaired at its working points while its character was left untouched, and they repay attention because later summaries frequently confuse them with liberalisation. The amendment of 1986 addressed the acquisition machinery. It revised the compensation arrangements attached to the disposal of uranium bearing material under Section 6, providing that compensation in respect of acquisition under that section was to be determined with regard to the cost of production of the mineral, concentrate or other material and such other factors as were relevant, with no account taken of the value of uranium in its natural state, and it inserted Section 11A to declare that compulsory acquisition under the Act was not to be deemed a sale for any purpose. The amendment is a window into the compensation philosophy of the code: the State acquired what the programme needed, paid on a cost based measure of its own design, and excluded from the measure the strategic value that made the material worth acquiring. Landowners and mine operators who dealt with the framework met that philosophy in practice, and it was stated in the statute rather than hidden in a schedule.

The amendment of 1987 addressed the operating form. Its Statement of Objects and Reasons recorded that achieving the envisaged target of ten thousand megawatts of installed nuclear generating capacity by the year 2000 would require a nuclear power corporation or government company to design, construct and operate nuclear power stations, raising resources beyond what government budgets supplied and gaining operational flexibility, and that amendment of the Atomic Energy Act was necessary to enable the Government to entrust its powers to such a company. The amendment accordingly enabled the entrustment, and the Nuclear Power Corporation was incorporated the same year. Two observations belong to a precise record. The target the amendment recited, ten thousand megawatts by 2000, was missed by a margin of several thousand megawatts, and the shortfall between recited targets and achieved capacity runs through the whole life of the Act as a recurring feature rather than an exception. And the amendment’s method, entrustment to a government company, became the template the amendment of 2015 extended and the replacement of 2025 finally broke with: for thirty eight years, every structural change to who could operate in the field was made by adjusting the definition of the public vehicle, never by admitting a private one.

Safety in practice: consents, codes and the working regulator

The safety regime that citizens and operators actually encountered under the Act was not the text of Section 17 but the consenting practice built on it and administered by the Board. A nuclear installation passed through staged regulatory consent: siting, construction, commissioning and operation each required the regulator’s approval, and the approval at each stage was the point at which the establishment’s plans met an examiner with power to require changes. Around the consenting spine the Board built a library of safety codes, guides and manuals covering design, operation, quality assurance, radiation protection and waste management, drawing on the standards of the International Atomic Energy Agency and on operating experience, and it conducted regulatory inspections at installations through their operating lives. For the far larger universe of radiation applications outside the power programme, hospitals with radiotherapy units, industries with radiography sources, research laboratories, the authorisation regime under the radiation protection rules performed the same function at smaller scale, licensing facilities and radiation workers and prescribing the conditions of possession, use, transport and disposal of radioactive material.

A fair account of this working regime has to hold two propositions together, because the record supports both. The first is that the consenting system functioned: installations were examined stage by stage by technically qualified reviewers, conditions were imposed and enforced through the Department’s own hierarchy, and the system’s outputs, whatever view is taken of the programme, were produced by real regulatory work rather than by its absence. The second is that the system’s legal foundations were exactly as fragile as the Auditor General described. The Board’s consent was powerful because the Department chose to treat it as binding within the family, and its inspectors entered installations because the operator admitted them; had an operator chosen to contest the Board’s legal authority to demand a change, the Board would have had to borrow the Central Government’s powers under the Act, as a delegate, against the Government’s own company. The peer review of 2015 and the audit of 2012 both fastened on that fragility, not on the competence of the people exercising it. The distinction matters for reading the replacement of 2025 correctly: what the SHANTI Act changed, on the regulatory side, was not the existence of safety review but its legal address, moving the reviewer from a delegated desk inside the operator’s department to a statutory office answerable to Parliament. The personnel, the codes and the consenting stages descend from the old regime. The authority beneath them is new.

The safeguards separation and the international dimension

No account of the Act’s working is complete without the international architecture that grew around it, because the architecture is what made the opening of 2025 thinkable. India conducted its programme outside the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which it regarded as discriminatory and never joined, and after the peaceful nuclear explosion of 1974 the programme worked under technology denial arrangements that cut it off from foreign reactors, fuel and much published research. The closed statutory framework and the international isolation reinforced each other: the Act’s monopoly was in part a response to isolation, and the isolation was in part a response to the programme the Act governed. The three stage programme’s emphasis on thorium, of which India holds some of the world’s largest deposits in its monazite sands, was itself a legal and material adaptation to isolation, an attempt to build a fuel cycle that no embargo could starve.

The separation plan of the middle two thousands broke the reinforcement. In the course of negotiating civil nuclear cooperation with the United States, India undertook to separate its civilian and military programmes, designating facilities as civilian and placing them under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency under an agreement concluded in 2008, the year the Nuclear Suppliers Group granted the waiver that allowed member states to trade in civil nuclear material and technology with India. The legal significance for this pillar is precise. Separation demonstrated, in practice and under international inspection, that the civilian programme could be identified, bounded and opened without opening the strategic programme, which is the factual premise on which the case for opening, stated earlier in this article, rests. The Act’s text did not change when separation happened. The monopoly of Section 3 continued to govern the safeguarded civilian facilities exactly as it governed the rest. But the premise of the text, that the field was indivisible and had to be held entire, had been falsified by the establishment’s own diplomacy seventeen years before the statute caught up, and the interval between the separation plan and the SHANTI Act is the second long delay this article records: not a regulator waiting for a statute, but a statute waiting for its premise to be abandoned in law after it had been abandoned in fact.

The definitions as a system of control

It is worth returning to Section 2 with the whole Act in view, because the definitions were not preliminary machinery but a control system in themselves. The Act’s operative provisions bite on categories, and the categories were defined so that the Central Government controlled their contents. A prescribed substance was a substance the Central Government prescribed by notification as necessary or useful for the field, and uranium, thorium and their compounds stood at the head of the prescribed class throughout the Act’s life; prescribed equipment likewise meant property the Government notified as specially designed or adapted for the production or use of atomic energy or of prescribed substances. The consequence is that the perimeter of the criminal law in this field, the licensing perimeter of Section 14 and the acquisition perimeter of Section 11, could be redrawn by gazette notification. Parliament enacted the prohibitions once, in general form, and the executive maintained the lists that decided where the prohibitions fell. That is a familiar Indian drafting pattern, but its significance in this sector is larger than usual, because the same government that maintained the lists was the only lawful operator inside them. There was no independent list keeper, and no parliamentary stage at which an extension of the prescribed categories to a new substance or a new class of equipment had to be justified to anyone outside the establishment.

The definition of fissile material displays the same structure with a scientific edge. It named uranium 233, uranium 235 and plutonium, reached any material containing them, and then added any other material the Central Government declared to be fissile. The declared tail of the definition matters because fissile status is a physical property that does not wait on notification, and the drafting handled the point by making the legal category partly physical and partly declaratory: the named isotopes were fissile in law because they are fissile in fact, and anything else became fissile in law when the Government said so. The definition of atomic energy itself, energy released from atomic nuclei including by fission and fusion, was drawn at the level of physics rather than technology, with the result that the Act’s control extended in principle to processes and materials far from any reactor, and the narrowing to the practical field was done by the prescribed lists and the licensing rules rather than by the definition. A statute whose definitions are drawn at maximum width and whose lists are kept by the operator is a statute designed for a closed programme, and the 1962 Act’s definitions are the cleanest evidence in its text that closure was the design and not an accident of administration.

The interpretation clauses in Section 2 completed the scheme by construing references to the working of minerals to include mining, getting, carrying away, transporting, sorting, extracting and treating, and references to the production or use of atomic energy to include processes preparatory and ancillary to production or use. Preparatory and ancillary are the two words that ensured no stage of the fuel cycle escaped through a gap between the named stages: exploration camps, concentration plants, transport convoys, fuel fabrication and waste handling all stood within the construed field, each governed by the section appropriate to it and all of them governed by the vesting. Reading the Act as a draftsman reads it, the structure is complete in a way few Indian statutes are. There is no ungoverned interstice in the civilian field. The questions the Act left open were not questions of coverage. They were questions of institution: who regulates, who may know, and who may enter. The Act answered the second and third with Sections 18 and 3 respectively. The first it did not answer at all, and the history of the unanswered question is the history this article has told.

Two overriding clauses: the Act and the transparency statute

One interaction deserves separate treatment because it produced the framework’s most instructive legal friction. Section 28 of the Atomic Energy Act gave its provisions effect notwithstanding anything inconsistent in any other law. The Right to Information Act of 2005 contained, in its own Section 22, an overriding clause of the same breadth, giving the transparency statute effect notwithstanding anything inconsistent in the Official Secrets Act and any other law, subject to the exemptions the transparency statute itself enacted. Two statutes, each claiming precedence over inconsistent law, met in the atomic sector with a forty three year difference in age and opposite defaults: the older Act organised around restriction of information, the newer around its disclosure. The meeting was managed in practice through the exemption in the transparency statute for information whose disclosure would prejudicially affect the sovereignty, security and strategic interests of the State, which supplied a textual home for most atomic withholdings without either overriding clause having to be deployed against the other, and through Section 18 of the atomic Act, whose restricted information regime operated as a substantive prohibition rather than as a mere withholding discretion.

The doctrinal point a reader should carry away is not which clause would have won a direct collision, a question no reported decision under the framework had to answer in terms. It is that the transparency statute changed the forum and the burden even where it did not change the outcome. Before 2005, information about the sector was withheld by the operation of Section 18 and departmental practice, and the citizen had no general instrument with which to ask. After 2005, the citizen had an application, a public information officer, a first appeal and a commission, and the establishment had to justify a withholding within the exemption’s language, document class by document class. The sector’s default remained closed in substance, as the courts and commissions recognised the strategic character of much of its record, but it became a closed default that had to be defended in an open procedure. That shift, modest as it sounds, is the transparency history of the framework in miniature, and it explains why the secrecy argument recorded earlier in this article was conducted, in the Act’s last two decades, in the vocabulary of exemptions and public interest rather than in the vocabulary of the 1962 text. The replacing legislation inherits that argument in its new form, and its handling of information will be tested in the same commissions and courts that tested its predecessor.

The debate of 2025 and the shape of the settlement

The replacing Act was presented to Parliament as the completion of a programme announced in the Budget for 2025 to 2026: a Nuclear Energy Mission directed at one hundred gigawatts by 2047, an opening of the sector to private participation, a statutory regulator, and a single statute in place of the two that had governed the field since 2010. The Minister of State who introduced the Bill, Jitendra Singh, presented it in those terms, as a measure to harness nuclear energy for the country’s development at a scale the public programme alone had not reached, with safety and security reserved to the State’s hands. The enacted settlement, described in the replacement section above, reflects that presentation closely: generation and operation opened under licence, the sensitive fuel cycle stages reserved, the regulator made statutory, the liability framework recast within the same statute, and foreign participation admitted as investment up to a stated ceiling rather than as operation by foreign companies.

The questions the settlement leaves open are institutional rather than rhetorical, and a pillar should end its account of the replacement by naming them plainly. The first is whether a statutory regulator funded and appointed within the new framework will exercise, in practice, the independence the Auditor General found missing in the delegated one; a statute is a necessary condition of that independence and was the missing condition for forty two years, and it is not by itself a sufficient one. The second is how the licensing of private operators will interact with the reserved stages: a licensed generator that cannot mine, enrich, reprocess or manage high level waste is a participant in a system whose commanding heights remain departmental, and the commercial shape of that participation will be determined by the rules whose drafts were under consultation in 2026. The third is the information settlement, where the older argument between strategic secrecy and the public interest in safety information will be refought on new text. The fourth, the liability settlement, is not this article’s to open. None of these questions can be answered from the enacted text alone, and this pillar, which has insisted throughout on distinguishing what a statute says from what a system does, records them as the agenda the replacement creates rather than as conclusions the replacement compels.

Compensation under the Act: Sections 12 and 21

The compensation code of the Act deserves a section of its own because it is the point at which the monopoly met the citizen’s property, and the meeting was arranged on the statute’s terms. Where the Central Government compulsorily acquired the exclusive right to work minerals or acquired a mine, a prescribed substance, equipment or a plant, the Act did not send the parties to the general law of compulsory acquisition. It supplied its own principles in Section 21, with Section 12 addressing compensation in the case of the compulsory acquisition of a mine. Regard was to be had, in the determination the Act prescribed, to the cost of production of the material and to such other factors as were relevant, and the value of uranium in its natural state was excluded from the account. The 1986 amendment, considered earlier, tightened the same philosophy into the disposal provisions of Section 6.

Three consequences followed from that design, and each is a proposition of law rather than of grievance. The measure of compensation was internal and purposive: the citizen was compensated for what the taking cost him in production terms, not for the strategic worth of what was taken, and the difference between those two measures is precisely the value the monopoly existed to capture for the State. The forum and the principles were those the acquiring statute itself supplied, so a challenge had to be fought on the Act’s ground. And the exclusion of natural state uranium value was not an oversight capable of correction by interpretation; it was the stated policy of the code, recited again in 1986, that the subterranean worth of the element belonged to the programme and not to the surface owner. A reader assessing the fairness of that settlement should hold it against the Act’s own preamble: a statute enacted for the welfare of the people of India, in a field where the people’s asset and the State’s programme were the same deposit, resolved the division in the programme’s favour, openly, twice, twenty four years apart. The replacing legislation inherits the reserved stages to which this code applied, and the terms on which private participants will meet the back end of the fuel cycle under the new framework are among the matters its rules will determine.

Section 19 and the physical perimeter

Section 19, the prevention of entry into prohibited areas, completed the secrecy regime on the ground. The Central Government could declare areas to be prohibited for the purposes of the Act, and entry into such areas, and the taking of photographs and the making of sketches and plans within them, stood restricted under the Act’s authority, backed by its penal provisions. The pairing of Section 18 and Section 19 is the whole information policy of the framework in two provisions: one governed the document, the other governed the place, and between them they organised the physical and informational geography of the programme into zones of permitted and forbidden knowledge. Installations were fenced in law before they were fenced in fact, and the citizen’s encounter with the sector was, by design, an encounter at a boundary.

The administrative consequence is worth stating because it shaped the sector’s public culture. A programme whose sites are prohibited areas, whose documents are restricted information, whose inventions cannot be patented and whose regulator published within a delegated mandate is a programme that communicates with its public through a narrow channel of official statement. The communication failures that attended siting controversies under the framework, most visibly in the protests that preceded the Kudankulam litigation, were argued by the establishment’s critics to be the predictable product of that channel: a public asked to accept an installation it could not inspect, described in documents it could not read, approved by a regulator it could not distinguish from the promoter, withheld acceptance in the only forum left to it, which was the street and then the court. The establishment’s answer, also on the record of those controversies, was that communication groups and expert committees were constituted to address local concerns and that the information genuinely withheld was the information the strategic programme required to be withheld. Both accounts describe the same statute from opposite ends, and the statute’s design, which made no provision at all for public communication as a function of the framework, is the fact beneath both.

The back end of the cycle: disposal, waste and reprocessing

Section 3’s vesting included disposal, a word that carries the fuel cycle’s longest obligations. Spent fuel from a reactor remains hazardous on timescales that dwarf the institutions managing it, and the Act assigned the whole of that obligation to the same Central Government that generated it: the power to dispose of atomic energy’s materials, the requisition powers of Section 15 over substances from which uranium or plutonium could be extracted, and the rule making power under which the safe disposal rules of 1987 were framed. India’s programme adopted reprocessing as policy, recovering plutonium from spent fuel for the fast breeder stage of the three stage programme, which placed the back end of the civilian cycle inside the same strategic perimeter as its front end and made the separation of the two programmes, when it came, a matter of designating facilities rather than of redesigning the cycle. Waste management facilities, interim storage and the route to final disposal were departmental operations under the Act, regulated in practice through the Board’s consenting and the waste rules, and the costs of the back end rested where the whole programme’s costs rested, on the public accounts of the Department.

The significance of the back end for the replacement is that it marks the boundary of the opening. The SHANTI Act reserved high level waste management and reprocessing to the Central Government and its entities, so the licensed private generator of the new framework produces spent fuel it does not finally own the problem of: the obligation travels back to the State at the point where the material becomes most dangerous and least commercial. That allocation is defensible on the ground the closed framework always used, that the back end is inseparable from the strategic material account, and it reproduces, inside the new settlement, the old settlement’s deepest feature: the State as the insurer and custodian of last resort for the hazards of the field. The financial terms on which that custody will be provided to private generators belong to the liability and rules territory of the new Act, and are noted here only to fix the boundary this pillar has drawn around its subject.

The Act for the aspirant: the examinable propositions

The reader payload of a statute pillar includes the candidate for whom this Act is a syllabus item with a stubborn habit of being misstated in guidebooks, so the propositions most often examined, and most often got wrong, are gathered here in the form this article has established them. The Act is Act 33 of 1962, assent on 15 September 1962, in force on 21 September 1962, enacted under the Union List entry for atomic energy and the mineral resources necessary for its production, replacing the Act of 1948, which its Section 32 repealed. The vesting provision is Section 3. The licensing provision is Section 14, with cancellation of a government company’s licence when it ceases to be one. Discovery is Section 4, mining control Section 5, disposal of uranium Section 6, restricted information Section 18, inventions and the patent bar Section 20, electricity Section 22, offences Sections 24 to 26, delegation Section 27, overriding effect Section 28, rules Section 30. The regulator was not created by the Act: the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board rests on the executive order of 15 November 1983. The audit that fixed its status in the official record is the Comptroller and Auditor General’s Report No. 9 of 2012. The Bill that would have made it statutory was introduced on 7 September 2011 and lapsed in 2014. The amendment that widened the government company definition is the Amendment Act of 2015, Act 5 of 2016, and it admitted public sector joint ventures only. The replacement is the SHANTI Act, Act 39 of 2025, assent on 20 December 2025, in force on 21 December 2025, repealing the Acts of 1962 and 2010, capping foreign investment at forty nine per cent and placing the regulator on a statutory footing. A candidate who holds those propositions, with those dates and those section numbers, holds the Act as the examiners’ source material states it, and holds it more accurately than a large share of the summaries in circulation.

Section 14 in practice: the licence as the citizen’s encounter

For almost every citizen who encountered the Atomic Energy Act directly, the encounter was Section 14 and the rules beneath it, in a hospital, a factory or a laboratory rather than at a power station fence. Radioactive substances and radiation generating equipment run through Indian medicine and industry at a scale the power programme’s publicity obscures: radiotherapy and nuclear medicine departments treating cancer, diagnostic imaging, industrial radiography testing welds in pipelines and pressure vessels, gauges measuring thickness and density in paper, steel and cement plants, irradiators sterilising medical products and treating food, research sources in universities. Every one of those activities involved the possession and use of radioactive material or prescribed equipment, and every one of them stood, in the framework’s design, inside the licensing perimeter: lawful only under authorisation, on conditions covering the qualification of the personnel, the shielding and layout of the facility, the accounting for sources, their transport in approved packages under the transport rules framed under the Act, and their eventual return or disposal through authorised channels.

The regulatory theory of that regime repays a paragraph, because it explains the Act’s otherwise puzzling reach into a dental X ray’s distant cousins. Ionising radiation is a hazard that does not announce itself to the senses and does not respect the competence of the person holding the source, and a source abandoned, stolen or discarded with scrap can injure people who never consented to any encounter with the nuclear field at all. A licensing system that follows the material, from import or manufacture through possession to disposal, with the holder authorised and accountable at each step, is the standard international answer to that hazard, and Section 14’s prohibition backed by licence is the form the answer took in Indian law. The Board administered the authorisation regime for these applications in practice, type approving equipment, licensing facilities and radiographers, and inspecting premises, under rules whose authority ran back through Section 30 to the Act. When the replacing Act of 2025 rebuilt the field, it preserved this distinction within its own architecture by separating the licence for nuclear facilities and materials from the safety authorisation for radiation practices, which is the delegated regime of the old Act reorganised into statutory form. The citizen’s encounter with atomic law was therefore never primarily with reactors. It was with the proposition, enacted in 1962 and carried through every successor arrangement, that radiation is a material the State tracks from cradle to grave and that private hands hold it on permission.

There is a second, quieter encounter worth recording: the inventor’s. Section 20’s bar meant that the considerable inventive activity the field generated outside the establishment, in universities and in the instrumentation industry, met a categorical refusal at the patent office rather than a negotiation, with the acquisition route and its compensation as the only door the statute opened. The establishment’s own inventions were protected, where protection was wanted, by the secrecy regime rather than by patent, since a patent is a publication. The result was a field in which the ordinary economy of invention, publish, patent, license, build, was suspended by statute for six decades, and in which the stock of domestic nuclear technology therefore accumulated almost entirely inside public institutions. Whether that suspension cost India innovation it would otherwise have had is a question the record cannot answer, because the counterfactual inventions were never filed; what can be said is that the replacing Act’s move to a qualified permissibility for peaceful uses, with screening for the reserved and sensitive categories, concedes the premise that the categorical bar had become a cost the new framework was unwilling to keep paying.

The environmental interface

The Act never contained an environmental code of its own, and the environmental discipline of the programme arrived from outside it, through the general law. Nuclear projects were brought within the environmental impact assessment regime administered under the Environment (Protection) Act of 1986, whose notification requires prior environmental clearance for listed projects, nuclear power and fuel processing among them, following assessment and public consultation in the district where a project is sited. The interface produced a distinctive dual structure in every siting controversy under the framework. The radiological safety of a plant was the province of the atomic framework and its regulator, into which the courts, on the Kudankulam pattern, declined to intrude beyond requiring that the prescribed clearances and their conditions be honoured. The land, water, thermal discharge, displacement and livelihood questions were the province of the general environmental process, in which the public had statutory points of entry, a hearing to attend and a clearance to challenge, and in which the atomic establishment appeared as a project proponent like any other, obliged to file its assessment and answer objections. The two structures met in the same project and answered different questions, and much public confusion in the controversies of the framework’s last decades came from expecting one structure to do the other’s work: the environmental hearing could not adjudicate reactor design, and the regulator’s consent could not adjudicate the justice of a land acquisition.

The courts’ role at the interface completes the jurisdictional picture drawn earlier in this article. A challenge could succeed on the environmental side for failure of the prescribed process without touching the safety case, and a challenge on the safety side met deference to the expert bodies; the framework thus distributed judicial power unevenly across the life of a project, generous at the perimeter of land and process, restrained at the core of radiological judgment. Critics of the arrangement argued that the restraint at the core was compounded by the regulator’s institutional position, since deference to a statutory regulator answerable to Parliament is one thing and deference to a delegate of the promoter is another, and that argument, unlike most in the field, was answered by events: the replacement of 2025 changed the regulator’s position, and the deference doctrine will operate in the new framework on the institution the critics asked for. What it will make of that institution in practice is, once again, a question the working of the new Act will answer rather than one this pillar will anticipate.

What the standing committee found in 2012

Because the lapsed Bill is the hinge of the regulator’s history, the scrutiny it received deserves the detail the parliamentary record supports. The Standing Committee on Science and Technology, Environment and Forests, reporting on 6 March 2012, examined the Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority Bill clause by clause and returned a report that accepted the Bill’s object while pressing on its independence at the points the critics had identified. It recommended that the Bill carry an express safeguard that nothing in the direction power be construed to empower the Central Government to interfere with the Authority’s exercise of its powers and functions, a proviso aimed at the policy directions clause under which the government would have bound the Authority on questions it finally characterised as policy. It recommended that any delegation of the Authority’s powers run only to officers and authorities possessing the necessary competence. It addressed the composition of the Council of Nuclear Safety, recommending that the number of nominated experts be restricted to a reasonable limit, and the eligibility for the Appellate Authority, recommending it be broadened so that eminent scientists could qualify. It expressed the view that a time limit, of one hundred and twenty or one hundred and eighty days, should be fixed for bringing the Act’s provisions into force, and it recommended that the facilities and materials exempted from the Authority on defence and security grounds be brought mandatorily within one or more regulatory bodies rather than left outside regulation altogether.

Read against the lapse that followed, the report cuts two ways, and a balanced account should let it. For the Bill’s defenders, the committee stage had done its work: the draft’s weaknesses had been identified through the ordinary parliamentary process and amendments proposed that would have produced a substantially independent authority, so the failure of 2014 was a failure to enact a scrutinised Bill rather than a failure to conceive one. For the Bill’s critics, the very need for a proviso forbidding governmental interference with the regulator’s functions, in a statute whose whole object was the regulator’s independence, showed how deeply the drafting had internalised the establishment’s habits, and the exempted facilities question, on which the committee itself had to press for mandatory substitute regulation, showed the perimeter at which independence was still expected to stop. Both readings are consistent with the report’s text. What neither reading changes is the outcome: the report was the high water mark of the statutory route for a decade and a half, and the next time Parliament legislated for the regulator it did so inside a replacement of the entire framework, on the timetable of an energy mission rather than of a safety audit.

The material base: uranium, thorium and the geography of control

The Act governed abstractions, prescribed substances and fissile material, but its control attached to a physical geography that explains much of the programme’s history. India’s uranium occurs in modest grades and concentrated locations, principally the Singhbhum belt of Jharkhand, where the Uranium Corporation’s mines and the mill at Jaduguda formed the foundation of domestic supply, with later production from Andhra Pradesh and exploration and development in other states conducted by the Department’s exploration arm. India’s thorium occurs abundantly but diffusely, in the monazite of the beach sands of the Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Odisha coasts, worked by the rare earths undertaking and held as the feedstock of the programme’s third stage. The consequence for the statute’s working was that the closed circuit of Sections 4 to 6 operated on a small number of known districts and a single corporate miner, and the notification and control provisions, drafted for a country, functioned in practice as the charter of a handful of mining enclaves whose relations with their surrounding populations, over land, water, tailings and health information, were conducted inside the same secrecy and departmental structures as the rest of the programme. The grievances of mining districts under the framework, argued over decades in the language of land acquisition, environmental clearance and occupational health, are the ground level form of the questions this pillar has treated at the level of sections: who controls, who may know, and who answers. The Act’s answers at ground level were the same as at the top. The Department controlled, through its corporation; knowledge ran through the restricted channels the statute built; and answerability ran upward within the establishment rather than outward to the district. The replacement’s reservation of atomic minerals to the Centre preserves the first of those answers in the new framework, and the others will be tested there.

The Act’s silences

A statute is defined by its silences as much as by its sections, and the 1962 Act’s silences form a set when they are listed together. It contained no provision for public consultation at any stage of siting, licensing or rule making: the public appears in its text as the beneficiary of the preamble, as the holder of minerals to be notified and acquired, and as the population the safety provisions exist to protect, but never as a participant with a procedural right. It contained no duty to publish the regulator’s findings, for the sufficient reason that it contained no regulator. It contained no compensation regime for nuclear damage to third parties, a silence that stood for forty eight years until a separate statute filled it in 2010 and that the present series treats in the article that owns it. It contained no parliamentary reporting obligation for the sector’s administration beyond the ordinary departmental accountabilities of government. And it contained no mechanism for its own periodic review: nothing in the Act required Parliament, the Department or anyone else to ask, at any interval, whether the vesting of 1962 still fitted the field of 1982 or 2002, and the question was accordingly asked only when events forced it, after an accident abroad in 2011 and in the audit cycle that followed.

The silences were not defects of drafting technique. They were the negative space of the design: a programme conceived as a departmental mission, in a field equated with national survival, had no structural need of participants, publications or reviews, and the Act faithfully omitted them. Their significance for the reader of the replacement is diagnostic. A reform of the framework can be measured by which silences it fills, and the SHANTI Act, on the published record of its contents, fills the regulator silence by statute, addresses the participation of private capital, and recasts liability, while the consultation and publication questions travel into the new framework substantially where the old one left them, to be settled by its rules and its practice. That measurement, neither praise nor condemnation, is the precise use of a pillar: it gives the reader a grid cut from the old statute’s actual text against which the new statute’s actual text can be laid, section by section and silence by silence, when the rules are final and the first licences are granted.

Electricity from the atom: the Section 22 world

One further feature of the operating framework deserves record before the assessment, because it determined how the programme met the citizen as consumer. Electricity generated at the nuclear stations entered the grid as the output of a central public sector generator, allocated and supplied under arrangements administered within the governmental system, and priced through the tariff processes applicable to central generating stations under the general electricity framework. The citizen who used nuclear electricity therefore stood at the end of two statutory chains that never formally met: the atomic chain, which decided that the electricity would exist and who would generate it, under Sections 3 and 22 of the 1962 Act, and the electricity chain, which decided how power from central stations is scheduled, allocated and paid for, under the general law whose map the guide cross linked earlier in this article draws. The junction mattered when the economics of nuclear power were argued, because the comparison between nuclear and other generation was conducted in the tariff world of the second chain, on levelised costs and capacity charges, while the strategic and fuel cycle costs of the programme lived in the departmental world of the first, where no tariff proceeding could reach them. Defenders of the programme’s economics located the full account in the strategic value the tariff world could not price; critics located it in the same place and called the arrangement an exemption from comparison. The statute book itself is agnostic, and this pillar records the junction because the replacement rearranges it: a licensed private generator sells electricity as a market participant within a licensing regime that also governs its fuel cycle custody, and the two chains of the old framework are drawn, for the first time, into a single statute’s field of vision.

The code as a whole: six groups of provisions

With the parts examined, the architecture of the thirty two sections can be seen whole, and it resolves into six groups whose relations are the Act’s real structure. The first group is the vesting group: Section 3 with the definitions of Section 2, which together decide who may act in the field and in what categories the field is described. The second group is the information group: Section 4’s notification of discovery, Section 7’s power to obtain information and Section 8’s powers of entry and inspection, which together decide what the State may know, a group whose importance grows the longer it is considered, because every other power in the Act depends on the information these sections extract from a field the State does not itself occupy at every point. The third group is the acquisition group: Sections 5 and 6 on mining and disposal, Sections 9 to 13 on working, acquisition, compensation and novation, and Section 15 on requisitioning, which together decide how material and rights move from private hands to the programme. The fourth group is the permission group: Sections 14, 16 and 17, the licence, the control of radioactive substances and the safety provisions, which decide the terms on which anyone, including the State’s own companies, may do the field’s work. The fifth group is the closure group: Sections 18, 19 and 20, restricted information, prohibited areas and the patent bar, which decide what may leave the field, in documents, in person or in published invention. The sixth group is the machinery group: Sections 22 to 32, electricity, the Factories Act interface, offences and cognizance, delegation, overriding effect, good faith protection, rules, the Act’s binding force on government and the repeal of 1948.

The relations among the groups are where the drafting intelligence of the Act sits. The permission group presupposes the information group: a licence can be policed only because Sections 7 and 8 let the licensor look. The acquisition group presupposes the information group in the opposite direction: the State can acquire the right mine only because Section 4 forces discovery into the open. The closure group protects the vesting group: the monopoly of Section 3 would leak through disclosure, entry and patent publication if Sections 18 to 20 did not seal it. And the machinery group subordinates the whole code to itself through Section 28’s overriding effect while Section 27’s delegation quietly enables the one institution the vesting group never contemplated. A code so arranged has no need of length. Its thirty two sections are few because each group does the work of a part in a longer statute, and its longevity, sixty three years with three amendments of substance, is partly explained by the completeness of the arrangement: there was never an operational gap that forced Parliament back to the Act, and the gaps that did force attention, the regulator above all, were gaps the arrangement had been designed not to see. Statutes usually fail by omission under pressure of events. This one succeeded, on its own terms, for two generations, and the terms are what the argument about it has always been about.

The Atomic Energy Act 1962: its life in one paragraph of dates

For the reader who wants the framework’s biography compressed, the dated skeleton is this. A predecessor Act in 1948, with the Atomic Energy Commission constituted the same year and the Department in 1954. The code itself: assent on 15 September 1962, force on 21 September 1962, under the Union List entry for atomic energy. The first corporate repair in 1986, adjusting acquisition compensation and inserting Section 11A. The operating company enabled in 1987, alongside the amendment that recited a ten thousand megawatt target for the year 2000. The regulator created by executive order on 15 November 1983, between those amendments, by delegation rather than by the code. The transparency statute of 2005 meeting the secrecy provisions of 1962 and being managed through exemptions. The safeguards separation of 2008, which divided the programme in fact. The accident abroad in March 2011, the statutory regulator Bill introduced on 7 September 2011, the standing committee’s report on 6 March 2012, the Auditor General’s Report No. 9 tabled on 22 August 2012, the Public Accounts Committee in 2013, the Bill’s lapse in 2014, the international peer review in 2015, the joint venture amendment enacted as Act 5 of 2016. The Budget announcement of the Nuclear Energy Mission in 2025, and the replacement: introduced on 15 December 2025, passed on 17 and 18 December, assented to on 20 December, in force on 21 December 2025 as Act 39 of 2025, repealing the codes of 1962 and 2010 together, with draft rules in public consultation in the late summer of 2026. Sixty three years of the Act, forty two of them with a regulator the Act did not create: that is the chronology the sections above have filled in, and it is the chronology against which any summary of Indian nuclear law should be checked before it is believed.

Three errors in circulation, gathered in one place

Because this article has corrected the same three errors at the points where they arise, it is worth gathering the corrections where a reader in a hurry will find them, since each error inverts a proposition the framework turns on. The first error describes the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board as a statutory body established under the Atomic Energy Act. The Act establishes no board. It contains safety provisions in Section 17 and a delegation provision in Section 27, and the Board was constituted under them by executive order in 1983, remaining in law a delegate of the Central Government for forty two years, as the Auditor General recorded. The second error describes the amendment of 2015 as the measure that admitted private participation in nuclear power. The amendment, Act 5 of 2016, widened the definition of a government company so that public sector joint ventures could hold licences, and it admitted no private and no foreign equity of any kind. The third error, the most consequential for any account written after December 2025, describes the replacing legislation in terms of its announcement rather than its enactment: the SHANTI Act is Act 39 of 2025, it was assented to on 20 December 2025 and brought into force on 21 December 2025, it repealed both the Act of 1962 and the liability Act of 2010, its foreign investment ceiling is forty nine per cent, foreign incorporated companies are not its licensees, and the working detail of its regime depends on rules that were in draft consultation in 2026 and must be checked in their final form. An account that gets those three corrections right is already more accurate than most of what the search results on this statute return, which is the condition the pillar exists to remedy.

Transitional questions the repeal raises

A repeal of a sixty three year old code leaves a tail of questions that the replacing Act and the general law between them must answer, and a pillar should identify the tail even where the final answers await the rules. Licences and authorisations granted under the old framework, to the operating companies for their stations and to the thousands of radiation facilities authorised under the rules, require continuity: the general law of repeal preserves rights and liabilities accrued under a repealed enactment, and a replacement statute of this kind ordinarily carries express savings and transitional provisions under which existing licences continue on their terms until they are renewed, replaced or expire under the new regime, and the detail of that migration is a rules question of the first importance to every hospital and industrial licensee in the country. Consents in progress at the repeal, for installations at the siting, construction and commissioning stages, travel with the same machinery. The Board itself presents the most interesting transition: a body created by executive order does not need to be abolished when a statute establishes it, and the statutory Board of the new framework is the institutional successor of the delegated Board of the old, carrying its personnel, codes and consenting history into a new legal personality, so that the forty two year story ends not with a regulator destroyed and another built but with the same regulator receiving, at last, the legal foundation its auditors had demanded. Pending proceedings, inspections and enforcement under the old rules are preserved by the standard operation of repeal and savings, and nothing in the transition disturbs the criminal liability accrued for offences committed while the old Act stood. Each of those propositions should be verified against the enacted transitional text and the final rules before operational reliance, which is the caution this article has attached to the replacement throughout; the shape of the tail, however, is fixed by the nature of repeal and can be stated with confidence. Operators, hospitals and industrial licensees should treat the migration of their licences and authorisations as live business under the new framework rather than as settled history, and should take the final rules, when published, as the governing text for their own positions.

The Department under the Prime Minister, and the road to 1962

Two features of the framework’s administrative placement complete the account of how the vesting worked in government. The Department of Atomic Energy was placed directly under the Prime Minister, an arrangement that persisted through the Act’s life and that expressed the field’s standing in the State’s hierarchy: the programme reported to the head of government rather than through a sectoral ministry of power or industry, its budget and its appointments carried that level of sponsorship, and its insulation from the ordinary machinery of ministerial and parliamentary questioning was correspondingly greater. The Atomic Energy Commission stood as the programme’s policy apex within that placement. For the legal reader, the placement explains a feature of the Act that might otherwise puzzle: the statute speaks throughout of the Central Government, without distributing functions among ministries or creating the inter departmental machinery a field spanning mines, industry, health and electricity would ordinarily require, because the administrative design had already concentrated the field in one department answering to one office. The Act’s unitary drafting and the government’s unitary placement of the subject are the same decision in two instruments.

The road from the Act of 1948 to the code of 1962 explains the younger statute’s completeness. The 1948 Act was an independence era measure, enacted when the programme was a research ambition and the State’s need was a general authority over a new science. By 1962 the programme had acquired its commission, its department, its research centre at Trombay, its uranium surveys and its three stage plan, and it stood at the threshold of power generation, with the decisions that generation would require, about mining rights, acquisition, licensing, electricity and secrecy, already visible. The 1962 Act was accordingly drafted as a code for an operating industry rather than as authority for a research programme, and it was drafted by a legislature that had watched the programme grow for fourteen years under the older Act and could see which powers the operating stage would need. That is why so little of it required amendment for operational reasons across sixty three years: the code had been written at the moment when the field’s permanent shape became visible, by people who correctly identified that shape, and its failures, where they came, were failures of the institutional imagination about regulation and openness rather than failures of foresight about the industry. The distinction is the fairest summary a pillar can offer of the statute it has just spent its length examining, and it is the note on which the assessment that follows is built.

The claim of this article: forty two years

The namable claim can be stated in full. The body responsible for the safety of India’s nuclear installations was created by an executive order in 1983 under a delegated power in a statute that never mentioned it. A former chairman of that body said, in print and repeatedly, that the arrangement denied it real independence. The national auditor examined it in 2012 and found, in terms, that it remained a subordinate authority exercising delegated functions rather than a regulator in law, and the international peer review reached the same destination in 2015. A Bill to give it statutory existence was introduced in 2011, reported on by a standing committee in 2012 and allowed to lapse in 2014, and for eleven years after the lapse no government reintroduced it. Statutory status arrived only in December 2025, as one element of a general replacement of the framework. Identified, diagnosed, legislated for, abandoned and finally addressed: the sequence spans forty two years, and no other regulatory independence problem in Indian law has that exact biography. The series this article belongs to has documented statutes that were never commenced, machinery that was never created and Bills that lapsed without trace. The atomic energy framework combined all three patterns in a single institution and carried them for two generations, which is why a pillar about a control statute is, at its centre, an article about a regulator that for most of its life had no statute at all.

The length of the interval also has a quieter explanation that the record supports and that completes the account. For most of the forty two years, the delegated arrangement worked well enough, in the only currency the system measured, to avoid forcing the question: consents were granted, inspections happened, installations operated, and the absence of a statute produced no single failure that could be laid at its door in a form politics could not absorb. Institutional defects of this kind, where the machinery functions and only its legal foundations are missing, are the defects democracies repair last, because every actor who could repair them is also an actor the unrepaired arrangement serves, and the cost of the defect is paid in a currency, public confidence and legal resilience, that does not appear in any year’s accounts. It took an accident abroad, an auditor’s report phrased in unusually plain language and, in the end, an energy mission that needed private capital to believe in the regulator, to make the missing statute expensive enough to enact. The capital, in the end, required what the citizens’ representatives and the national auditor had asked for in vain: a regulator whose authority a counterparty could read in an Act of Parliament. That sequence is not a cynical footnote to the story. It is the story’s mechanism, and it generalises beyond this sector to every delegated regulator whose statute has been promised and postponed.

What became of the Board when the SHANTI Act replaced the framework?

The Board was placed on a statutory footing for the first time. The SHANTI Act established the regulator by statute, accountable to Parliament, with power to frame safety standards, set radiation limits, grant the safety authorisations the new regime requires and issue binding directions, and the institution carried its personnel, codes and consenting practice into the new legal personality.

A closing word on sources and limits. This pillar states the law of the 1962 Act from its text, the regulator’s history from the constitution order, the audit report and the parliamentary record of the lapsed Bill, and the replacement from its enacted record as published. It offers legal information, not legal advice, and any person dealing with a licence, a disclosure question or a claim touching this field should take advice on the current text, including the rules framed under the replacing Act, before acting. What the pillar leaves behind is deliberate: the liability controversy belongs to the next article in the run, and the 1962 Act, repealed though it stands, remains the grammar in which Indian nuclear law was written for sixty three years and the unavoidable starting point for reading the statute that replaced it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What does the Atomic Energy Act 1962 control?

The Act controlled the whole field of atomic energy in India. Section 3 vested the production, development, use and disposal of atomic energy in the Central Government, together with research and the manufacture of prescribed and radioactive substances. Around that vesting the Act built controls over the discovery and mining of uranium and thorium, the licensing of production and use, the handling of radioactive substances, safety, the disclosure of information, inventions and the generation of electricity, backed by offences and penalties in Sections 24 to 26 and an overriding effect clause in Section 28.

Q: Who could generate nuclear power under the Act?

Only the Central Government and the vehicles it owned. Section 3 allowed the Government to act through an authority or corporation it established or through a government company, defined by majority central shareholding, and Section 14 licensed production and use within that perimeter. In practice two public sector companies under the Department of Atomic Energy, the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited and Bharatiya Nabhikiya Vidyut Nigam Limited, operated every nuclear power plant in the country. No private company, Indian or foreign, could generate nuclear power under the framework at any point in its life.

Q: What was the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board’s legal basis?

The Board rested on an executive order, not on a statute. It was constituted on 15 November 1983 by order of the President, in exercise of powers the Central Government held under the Atomic Energy Act and delegated to it, drawing principally on the safety provisions of Section 17 and the delegation power of Section 27. The Act never mentioned the Board, fixed none of its composition, tenure, funding or powers, and created no offence of disobeying it. Its legal status was therefore that of a delegate of the Central Government, subordinate to the government whose department operated the facilities it regulated.

Q: Why was the nuclear regulator criticised as not independent?

Because its institutional lines ran into the establishment it regulated. The Board reported to the Atomic Energy Commission, whose Chairman was the Secretary of the Department of Atomic Energy, the department operating the plants through its companies. It depended on the Department for budget and administrative support and drew most of its expert committee strength from the Department’s own institutes and retired personnel. The Comptroller and Auditor General’s Report No. 9 of 2012 recorded that the Board remained in law a subordinate authority exercising delegated functions, without the statutory jurisdiction and enforcement powers a regulator requires.

Q: What happened to the nuclear regulatory authority bill?

The Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority Bill, 2011 was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 7 September 2011, after the accident at Fukushima, to dissolve the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board and replace it with a statutory authority overseen by a Council of Nuclear Safety. The standing committee on science and technology reported on the Bill on 6 March 2012, recommending safeguards against governmental interference with the Authority’s functions. The Bill was then never enacted. It lapsed on the dissolution of the Fifteenth Lok Sabha in 2014 and was not reintroduced, leaving the executive order of 1983 in place for eleven further years.

Q: What secrecy provisions does the atomic energy law contain?

Section 18 of the Act allowed the Central Government to declare information about a plant, a process or prescribed substances to be restricted information, and made its unauthorised disclosure an offence punishable under Section 24. Section 19 supported the regime physically by providing for prohibited areas, with restrictions on entry, photography and sketching. Together the two provisions placed a substantial part of the sector outside the ordinary operation of the transparency statute, whose security and strategic interests exemption supplied the withholding ground when information was sought under the Right to Information Act.

Q: Why can atomic energy inventions not be patented?

Because two provisions working together barred the grant. Section 20 of the Atomic Energy Act provided that no patent was to be granted for an invention which in the opinion of the Central Government was likely to be useful for or related to atomic energy, across production, control, use, disposal and the handling of prescribed and radioactive substances, and routed applications in the field for the Government’s opinion. The Patents Act contained the corresponding exclusion of inventions relating to atomic energy from patentability. The design treated a patent filing as a disclosure the closed programme could not permit, with compulsory acquisition of rights and compensation as the inventor’s only route.

Q: What has replaced the Atomic Energy Act?

The Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India Act, 2025, known as the SHANTI Act, Act 39 of 2025. It was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 15 December 2025, passed by both Houses within three days, assented to on 20 December 2025 and brought into force on 21 December 2025, repealing both the Atomic Energy Act, 1962 and the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, 2010. It permits licensed private participation in generation with foreign investment capped at forty nine per cent, reserves the sensitive fuel cycle stages to the Central Government, and places the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board on a statutory footing.

Q: When did the Atomic Energy Act 1962 come into force?

The Act, Act 33 of 1962, received the assent of the President on 15 September 1962 and was brought into force on 21 September 1962 by notification G.S.R. 1254 of 18 September 1962, published in the Gazette of India. Section 1 left the commencement date to be appointed by the Central Government, and the appointed date followed the assent by six days. From that date the Act governed the whole of India, replacing the Atomic Energy Act of 1948, which its Section 32 repealed, and it remained the governing code of the field for sixty three years until its repeal in December 2025.

Q: Which entry of the Union List empowered Parliament to enact the Atomic Energy Act?

The Union List entry covering atomic energy and the mineral resources necessary for its production, Entry 6 of List I of the Seventh Schedule. That entry is the constitutional foundation of the entire framework: it places both the energy and the minerals it depends on within Parliament’s exclusive legislative field, which is why atomic minerals were never governed by the shared mines and minerals arrangements that apply to other minerals, why no state legislature could construct a licensing regime for uranium, and why the control statute of 1962 could vest the field in the Central Government end to end without a federal contest over competence.

Q: What is a prescribed substance under the Atomic Energy Act?

A prescribed substance was a substance the Central Government prescribed by notification for the purposes of the Act, the category at the centre of its control system. Uranium, thorium and their compounds and ores stood at the head of the prescribed class throughout the Act’s life, and the notification device allowed the perimeter to be adjusted by executive act. The category did real legal work: it triggered the discovery and disposal duties, the acquisition powers of Section 11, the licensing requirement of Section 14 and the secrecy provisions, so that defining the list of prescribed substances amounted to defining where the Act’s prohibitions fell.

Q: What did the Atomic Energy (Amendment) Act 2015 change?

The amendment, enacted as Act 5 of 2016, widened the definition of a government company in Section 2 and worked the corresponding change in Section 14. Alongside the original limb of a company with not less than fifty one per cent of its paid up share capital held by the Central Government, a company whose whole capital was held by one or more such government companies, with articles empowering the Central Government to constitute its board, also qualified. The object was to let the Nuclear Power Corporation form joint ventures with other public sector undertakings. The amendment admitted no private and no foreign equity.

Q: What happened to a licence when a government company stopped being a government company?

The licence stood cancelled by operation of the provision Section 14 carried for that case. On the licensee ceasing to be a government company, its licence under the section was cancelled, its assets vested in the Central Government free from liability, and the Central Government was required to take such measures as were necessary for the safe operation of the plant and the disposal of the nuclear material vested in it. The drafting made the licence an incident of public ownership rather than an asset the company owned: privatisation of the licensee would have extinguished the licence and returned the plant, with a statutory duty of safe operation, to the Centre.

Q: What penalties did the Atomic Energy Act prescribe for offences?

Section 24 made contraventions of the Act’s control provisions punishable with imprisonment extending to five years, or with fine, or with both. The offences included producing or using atomic energy or handling prescribed substances without the licence Section 14 required, breaching the control provisions on radioactive substances, and disclosing restricted information contrary to Section 18, and the section reached attempts and abetment as well as completed acts. Section 25 fixed responsibility for offences by companies on the persons in charge of their business, and Section 26 required the previous sanction of the Central Government or its empowered authority before a prosecution could be instituted.

Q: What rules were framed under the Atomic Energy Act 1962?

Section 30 of the Act conferred the rule making power, and the working regime lived in the instruments framed under it. They included the Atomic Energy (Working of Mines, Minerals and Handling of Prescribed Substances) Rules of 1984 for the mining end of the fuel cycle, the Atomic Energy (Safe Disposal of Radioactive Waste) Rules of 1987 for its back end, the Atomic Energy (Factories) Rules of 1996 for the sector’s industrial operations, and the Atomic Energy (Radiation Protection) Rules of 2004, which supplied the authorisation regime for radiation applications in medicine, industry, agriculture and research across the country.

Q: Who operated India’s nuclear power plants under the 1962 framework?

Two public sector companies under the administrative control of the Department of Atomic Energy. The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited, incorporated in 1987 after an amendment of the Act enabled the Central Government to entrust power stations to a government company, designed, built and operated the country’s nuclear power stations. Bharatiya Nabhikiya Vidyut Nigam Limited was established for the fast breeder reactor programme. No other operator existed at any point in the framework’s life. On figures recorded by the Observer Research Foundation from official sources, the fleet stood at twenty four reactors with 8,780 megawatts of installed capacity in December 2025.

Q: What did the IAEA peer review of 2015 say about India’s nuclear regulator?

An Integrated Regulatory Review Service mission of the International Atomic Energy Agency reviewed India’s regulatory framework in 2015 and recommended that the regulator be separated, in law and in effective practice, from the entities whose responsibilities or interests could influence its decision making. The recommendation converged with the finding the Comptroller and Auditor General had recorded in Report No. 9 of 2012 and with the criticism a former Chairman of the Board, A. Gopalakrishnan, had made over many years: that a regulator created by executive order within the operating department could not possess the independence the function requires. The statutory cure arrived with the replacing Act of 2025.

Q: When did the SHANTI Act come into force?

The Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India Act, 2025, Act 39 of 2025, received the assent of the President on 20 December 2025, following its introduction in the Lok Sabha on 15 December 2025 and its passage by the Lok Sabha on 17 December and the Rajya Sabha on 18 December. It came into force on 21 December 2025, and its repeal of the Atomic Energy Act, 1962 and the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, 2010 took effect with it. The Department of Atomic Energy later placed draft rules and regulations under the new Act in public consultation between 14 August and 4 September 2026.

Q: Does the SHANTI Act allow foreign companies to operate nuclear plants in India?

No, not as operators in their own right. The replacing Act of 2025 opens nuclear generation to licensed Indian companies, including companies formed with public sector participation, and admits foreign participation as investment in nuclear projects capped at forty nine per cent. Companies incorporated outside India are not themselves eligible to hold the licences the Act requires for building, owning, operating or decommissioning a nuclear facility. Foreign suppliers may participate in the supply chain under the licensing and contract framework, and the sensitive stages of the fuel cycle, including enrichment, reprocessing and high level waste management, remain reserved to the Central Government and its entities.

Q: How did the Atomic Energy Act 1962 treat compensation for compulsory acquisition?

The Act supplied its own compensation principles rather than borrowing the general land acquisition law. Section 21 laid down the principles for compensation under the Act and Section 12 addressed the compulsory acquisition of a mine, with the acquisition powers themselves in Sections 10 and 11 covering mineral rights, prescribed substances, minerals, equipment and plant. Regard was to be had to the cost of production of the material and other relevant factors, and the value of uranium in its natural state was expressly excluded from the computation, a policy the amendment of 1986 restated in the disposal provisions. The citizen was compensated on a production cost measure designed by the acquiring statute itself.