As India approaches its much-awaited Union Budget season, the American intervention in Venezuela serves as a sobering reminder. Ultimately, we depend on imported energy, chiefly oil, to fuel our economic engine. It is no surprise that we have aggressively adopted renewable energy, especially solar energy, for electricity generation. However, the inescapable conclusion is that a third of India’s electricity is still generated from oil and gas today.
India’s energy import dependence may reach an alarming 51% by 2030. With rising per capita incomes, per capita energy consumption rises too, with data centres and artificial intelligence infrastructure being particularly energy intensive, energy requirements will be greater than anticipated going forward. Nuclear energy is a safe, dependable, and domestically sourced solution to navigating supply chains that turn economic problems into geopolitical ones and vice versa.
India was an early entrant in building a credible nuclear science complex, shepherded by Homi Bhabha with Nehru’s carte blanche. This also made sure that the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) had, and continues to have, great freedom by being attached to the PMO. Thus, the DAE runs its own institutions, trains its own scientists from a relatively early stage, is free from compromising on merit under reservations, and does not have to contend with the byzantine bureaucracy that has otherwise ossified India’s broader scientific complex. If one looks at DAE’s indigenous development of nuclear technology or at civilian applications of radioactive substances, India was at the cutting edge till the 1980s.
Our situation has since deteriorated drastically in a globally competitive world. China, Russia, and the USA have invested heavily in nuclear energy. Apart from issuing successive friendly regulations for entities intending to work in the nuclear space, substantial funds have been directed in these countries to the research and development of affordable, safe, and commercialisable nuclear technologies. India dithered, focusing largely on building reactors that, at best, offered incremental technology improvements.
India’s recent liberalisation-cum-reform of the civil nuclear legal landscape with the Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India (SHANTI) Act, 2025, is coming long after all three of our competitors had independently developed their own small modular reactors (SMRs). Embarrassingly, the Bharat Small Reactor (BSR) initiative was announced after the USA and China had working SMRs of their own. Ironically, India is belatedly seeking partnerships with what are, geopolitically and technologically, our rivals to make up for lost time.
Bhabha recognised early on that India could gain control over its energy supply by using the abundant thorium found in monazite sands along its coast. India has the world’s largest reserves of thorium. He created a three-stage plan for India’s nuclear sector that aimed to eventually use thorium-based reactors. However, the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) has made little progress on this plan. India continues to spend heavily on energy imports each year while its thorium reserves remain unused.
Initially, concerns about producing plutonium for military and civilian purposes may have set back the plan. However, the lack of attention to thorium can also be linked to the nuclear agreements with the US and France that started in 2005. These agreements focused on rapidly increasing energy output from uranium reactors rather than researching thorium, our native strength. In the meantime, Russia had already beaten India to stage 2 of Bhabha’s plan, which is to have a working fast-breeder reactor that can convert thorium-232 into the actually usable uranium 233. Unfortunately, India’s own prototype fast-breeder reactor at Kalpakkam required extensive Russian inputs.
However, the coup de grâce came barely a few days ago. A USA entity, Clean Core Thorium Energy, supported by the Idaho National Lab, has successfully produced and tested commercially usable thorium-based fuel for existing pressurised heavy water reactors, which make up the bulk of India’s reactor fleet. Why this development has not come from the DAE but from an American startup is a question with no convenient or comfortable answers.
With this development, India has indeed lost the thorium race—the PSU NTPC has even accepted that it is exploring an acquisition of some stake in Clean Core Thorium Energy, which is as close to an acceptance of defeat as there can be. From being a pioneer to becoming a consistent laggard, there is much left to be desired and even more for our nuclear complex to answer.
What is most alarming is that Clean Core Thorium Energy counts amongst its advisors Anil Kakodkar, the former director of BARC, the former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and the former Secretary of the DAE who continues to serve on the boards and bodies of many government committees and PSUs. There was involvement of someone who served at the very apex of India’s nuclear complex with an entity that upstaged India in its own stated goals.
‘Leakage’ of critical know-how by institutional insiders has cost India dearly in the past as well. India used to be a world leader in pharmaceutical process chemistry, particularly in the production of fermentation-based API. Chemists in government institutions began working with private players and even setting up their own companies, where developments from government labs entered these companies by osmosis. Soon enough, Chinese companies began aggressively acquiring these companies and absorbing their know-how for use in China. Once the transfer of knowledge was complete, the Chinese would scuttle the companies they acquired in India, and often had agreements in place to prevent the same know-how of the involved scientists from being shared with third parties.
Thus, India’s hold on fermentation-based APIs evaporated altogether, while China achieved unassailable economies of scale. Now, through schemes like the Production-Linked Incentive, India has to spend billions to recover some bits of what was developed here and subsequently squandered.
Is something similar set to happen to India’s civilian nuclear sector? The USA has, decades after signing the nuclear deal, suddenly given approvals to a number of entities, including Clean Core Thorium Energy, to set up base and do business in India. A 2025 joint statement between the American president and Indian PM also explicitly mentions building “US-designed nuclear reactors in India through large-scale localisation and possible technology transfer”.
If the technology stack we use to bring our thorium to market is foreign, the three-stage plan’s raison d’être is defeated, with form trumping substance. The dependence on the USA, which has been recognised as a geopolitical rival, for our nuclear energy stack will integrate a deep supply chain vulnerability in India, greatly constraining our strategic autonomy. While investments are welcome, dependence in an age of empires is weaponised in a world where big eats small, i.e., matsya nyaya, dominates.
Securing India’s supply chains is as much a matter of economics as it is a war. Our recent book, “India’s Supply Chains in a World at War: Trade, Power, Conflict, and Entanglement among Empires in the New Global Order”, discusses the above themes in detail with a dedicated chapter on India’s energy security. The book explores how conflict, commerce, and civilisation are now entangled, shaping who commands and who complies in the emerging global order. As the balance shifts from efficiency to resilience, the book argues that power today lies not in territory but in control of routes, resources, and relationships.
Gautam Desiraju is at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Deekhit Bhattacharya is an advocate based in New Delhi. Views expressed here are personal to the authors.
