India’s energy transition is often framed in terms of targets. Less attention is paid to moments when a target signals an entirely new trajectory. The Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India (SHANTI) Bill, 2025 is one such moment. It is not a marginal policy adjustment, but a nation-scale reform, one that reshapes how India finances, builds, and governs nuclear power, and in doing so opens new opportunities for international energy partnerships, including with the United Kingdom.
At the centre of this reform lies an ambition of unmistakable scale. India has set a goal of reaching 100 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2047. From today’s level of roughly 8–9 GW, this represents more than a tenfold expansion within a single generation. In global terms, it is transformative. That kind of nuclear energy capacity would place India alongside the top nations in the league. This is not simply about adding reactors; it is about repositioning nuclear power from the margins of India’s energy mix to a central pillar of long-term energy security and decarbonisation.
Today, nuclear energy accounts for about three per cent of India’s electricity. As demand soars from data centres, advanced manufacturing, and electric transport, India needs assured, clean, round-the-clock power at scale. More nuclear energy is therefore an inescapable choice. And that requires institutions, laws, and frameworks to meet future aspirations.
This is where SHANTI is decisive. The Bill consolidates multiple legacy statutes into a single, future-ready framework, tackling two key barriers that have constrained nuclear expansion globally: liability uncertainty and limited access to private capital. By modernising civil nuclear liability in line with international best practice and clarifying risk allocation across the project lifecycle, SHANTI makes projects immediately bankable.
Equally important, the reform enables private participation with a licence. Private firms and joint ventures will be able to build, own, operate, and decommission nuclear facilities under rigorous government oversight. This is not deregulation; it is disciplined opening. Strategic activities such as mining, enrichment, reprocessing, high-level waste management, and heavy water production, remain firmly under state control. India’s red lines on safety, sovereignty, and public interest are not diluted. They are explicitly reinforced.
For international partners, including those in the United Kingdom, this distinction matters. Long-horizon infrastructure investment depends less on headline ambition than on credible rules. In that sense, SHANTI functions much like a modern free-trade agreement for energy: not focused on tariffs alone, but on rules and regulatory certainty. It anchors investment over decades and integrates India more deeply into global industrial and technological ecosystems.
The strategic relevance of this reform was underscored during the visit of Prime Minister Modi to the UK in July 2025 and the visit of PM Sir Keir Starmer to India in October 2025, which marked a step-change in the breadth and ambition of India–UK cooperation on clean energy, climate, and critical technologies.
These visits demonstrated that our partnership is increasingly focused on co-developing the infrastructure and technologies that will shape the global energy transition, ranging from partnerships in emerging technology, AI research, and critical minerals. These new areas of ambition for the partnership, offer us shared space for resilience in value chains of production in future areas of technology, upon which energy will depend for both supply and demand. Moreover, they offer us scope for jointly setting standards for the future of sustainable long-term energy security. The formation of an India–UK Offshore Wind Taskforce, alongside engagement through the Global Clean Power Alliance, reflects a shared commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals.
Equally important is the India–UK Climate Finance Initiative, aimed at mobilising capital at both quality terms and scale, required to unlock sustainable green growth and meet net-zero ambitions in both countries.
Innovation and entrepreneurship are integral to this agenda. The Climate Technology Start-up Fund, backed by joint investment under a memorandum of understanding between the UK Government and the State Bank of India, will support entrepreneurs working at the intersection of climate, technology, and artificial intelligence. This is precisely the ecosystem from which next-generation clean-energy solutions, including advanced nuclear applications, will emerge.
Within this broader landscape, future civil nuclear cooperation occupies a natural place. Our engagement on next generation nuclear technologies such as small modular reactors, recognising their potential to deliver flexible, scalable, low-carbon power for industrial clusters, is a step toward mainstreaming this cooperation. India’s Nuclear Energy Mission, with substantial public funding and a clear deployment pathway, aligns well with the UK’s strengths in reactor design, regulation, safety assurance, and project delivery.
Taken together, these developments reveal a clear roadmap: India and the United Kingdom are now ready to build a partnership that integrates technology security, climate finance, clean-energy deployment, and advanced manufacturing. For India, SHANTI is a clear statement of intent: to modernise institutions, unlock investment at scale, and place nuclear energy firmly within a clean, secure, and sustainable future. By modernising India’s nuclear framework, it strengthens collaboration with trusted partners who share high standards of safety, governance, and long-term responsibility. For Britain therefore, this is a mutually beneficial opportunity to engage with India’s nuclear renaissance as a strategic partner.
As our two countries look ahead, civil nuclear cooperation should be understood not as a niche concern, but as a strategic pillar of an increasingly integrated India–UK relationship, one that recognises that energy security, climate ambition, and technological leadership are now inseparable, just as the future of our planet is also indivisible. And in an increasingly uncertain world, these new directions for the India-UK partnership offer prospects for stability, growth, and sustainability.
