The Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi, has publicly endorsed India's Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India (SHANTI) Act 2025 and the country's stated target of approximately 100 gigawatts of nuclear power capacity by 2047 — remarks that constitute the first substantive public statement from the head of the global nuclear watchdog on the legislation since it was passed by both houses of the Indian Parliament on 18 December 2025. Speaking in an interview to NDTV from Vienna, Mr Grossi described India as "an important nuclear power consumer, user, developer" and called India's new energy policy direction "very positive".

The endorsement signals a substantive evolution in the relationship between the Vienna-headquartered IAEA — the United Nations system's specialised agency for nuclear safety, security and safeguards — and a country that has historically engaged with the global nuclear order on terms of its own choosing. It also lands at a moment when the international community is grappling with two parallel and partially conflicting trends: a substantial revival of interest in nuclear energy driven by climate, energy-security and artificial-intelligence-related power demand considerations on one side, and an increase in the targeting of civilian nuclear facilities in conflict zones on the other.

What Grossi said

In his interview, Mr Grossi was unequivocal in his support for the Indian legislation. "Well, I think it is very positive. Why I say this? Because, naturally, India has been, traditionally, an important nuclear power consumer, user, developer, and now it has an energy policy, which is very well known, on which the nuclear factor is poised to increase quite importantly," he said.

The Director General specifically indicated that the new policy framework would translate into a substantively expanded operational relationship between the Agency and India. "This means that we are going to be working with India much more. I have been visiting India and I will return. So all of that, for us, is good news," he added. Behind this short statement is the operational reality that an India targeting 100 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2047 — up from approximately 8 gigawatts today — will require IAEA engagement on safety standards, on safeguards relating to civilian-side reactors, on training of safety personnel, on emergency-preparedness frameworks, and on a substantial volume of technical assistance over a multi-decade horizon.

The SHANTI Act in context

The SHANTI Act — formally the Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India Act 2025 — was passed by both houses of the Indian Parliament on 18 December 2025. It is, by most analytical measures, the most consequential single piece of nuclear-sector legislation India has enacted since the Atomic Energy Act of 1962. It does five things, in combination, that together restructure how the Indian nuclear sector functions.

First, it repeals the Atomic Energy Act 1962 and the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act 2010 in their entirety, replacing both with a single consolidated legal framework. Second, it permits, for the first time since Independence, private Indian companies, joint ventures, and foreign-invested entities to build, own, operate, and decommission nuclear power plants in India — ending the operational monopoly of the state-owned Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL). Third, it grants statutory status to the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), giving the country's nuclear safety regulator a firm legal foundation that it had lacked through more than four decades of operation under executive authority. Fourth, it restructures the operator-liability framework, replacing the previous flat cap with graded caps tied to reactor capacity — ranging from Rs 1 billion (~USD 11 million) for smaller installations to Rs 30 billion for reactors generating more than 3,600 megawatts. Fifth, it amends the supplier-liability provision that had, for 15 years, been the principal commercial obstacle to foreign nuclear vendor participation in the Indian market.

Certain strategic functions — uranium enrichment, isotopic separation, spent-fuel reprocessing, management of high-level radioactive waste, and heavy-water production — are retained under exclusive central government control. The Act is therefore not a wholesale privatisation; it is a calibrated opening of the generation and decommissioning side of the sector, with the strategic and sensitive functions kept within sovereign hands.

The scale of the ramp-up

The numbers behind Grossi's endorsement give it material weight. India today operates approximately 24 commercial nuclear reactors with an aggregate installed capacity of around 8 gigawatts. The 100-gigawatt target articulated by the Government of India for 2047 implies an approximately twelvefold expansion of the nuclear fleet over the next two decades. Whether or not that specific target is achieved on schedule, the implied rate of capacity addition is substantially higher than any rate the Indian nuclear industry has previously sustained.

A target of this scale cannot be delivered by NPCIL alone — and this is the central operational reason for opening the sector to private and joint-venture participation. International nuclear vendors — including Westinghouse and General Electric of the United States, EDF (Électricité de France), Korea's KEPCO, and Russia's Rosatom — have for years expressed interest in the Indian market but have, in successive rounds, been deterred by the supplier-liability provisions of the 2010 CLND Act. The SHANTI Act's restructuring of supplier liability, by substantially restricting the operator's right of recourse against suppliers except in narrowly defined circumstances, brings the Indian framework closer to international norms — and is the principal reason that observers across both the Indian and international nuclear policy communities have described the legislation as a "game-changer".

Small Modular Reactors and AI-driven nuclear demand

The SHANTI Act's framework is also explicitly enabling for Small Modular Reactor (SMR) technology — the class of nuclear reactor designs, typically in the 50-300 megawatt range, that has become the focus of international nuclear-industry attention over the past five years. SMRs are smaller, designed to be factory-built and shipped to site, and are seen as a potential solution for both grid-scale baseload and for the rapidly growing power demand of data centres, particularly those operating large artificial intelligence training and inference workloads.

The convergence of AI-related power demand and the nuclear-policy cycle is one of the factors the IAEA has been tracking globally. Multiple major US technology companies have, over the past two years, announced direct contracts with nuclear operators or commitments to underwrite new SMR development. India's nuclear opening therefore arrives at a moment when international capital is genuinely interested in funding new nuclear capacity — a coincidence of timing that may shape how rapidly Indian projects can be scaled.

The honest reading: domestic critique

The SHANTI Act has not been received in India without criticism. The principal domestic objections, articulated during the parliamentary debate and in subsequent policy commentary, are threefold. First, the dilution of the operator's right of recourse against suppliers — Section 17(b) of the 2010 CLND Act, which had given operators broad standing to seek compensation from suppliers for incidents arising from defective equipment — has been substantially restricted. Critics argue this reduces accountability of foreign vendors for equipment quality. Defenders argue that the previous framework had effectively closed the Indian market to international supply and was the proximate reason that no major foreign nuclear contract had been concluded in 15 years.

Second, Section 39 of the SHANTI Act has been criticised for overriding the Right to Information Act with respect to "restricted" nuclear information. The Government's case is that nuclear-sector information requires bespoke protective handling on safety and security grounds; the rights-monitoring case is that an across-the-board override of RTI in a sector now opened to private participation creates a transparency gap. The balance between sectoral confidentiality and public accountability will be one of the ongoing debates as implementation proceeds.

Third, some analysts have argued that the liability caps — even at the upper bound of Rs 30 billion for the largest reactors — do not realistically reflect potential damages from a serious nuclear incident, and that the Government's residual fiscal obligation to fund compensation above the caps remains substantial. The counter-argument is that no jurisdiction in the world prices nuclear liability at full theoretical damage potential, and that the Indian framework is now broadly consistent with international convention norms.

Nuclear safety in conflict zones

A substantial portion of the NDTV interview was dedicated to the question of nuclear-facility safety in conflict zones — an issue that has acquired heightened relevance through the Zaporizhzhia experience in Ukraine, and through more recent reports of attacks on or risks to nuclear infrastructure at Barakah in the United Arab Emirates and Bushehr in Iran during 2025-26.

Mr Grossi acknowledged the concerns directly. "That is a very valid point and we have been addressing this. Of course, it worries us a lot. But it doesn't only worry us, we act on it, as you know," he said. He emphasised the IAEA's operational role on the ground in such situations. "We don't just Tweet about something. We go to places like we have been doing for almost five years in Ukraine at the front line." The Director General has himself made multiple in-person visits to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022, and IAEA monitoring teams have maintained continuous presence at the site.

On the broader question of whether attacks on nuclear infrastructure are deterring countries from new nuclear investment, his answer was clear: "We don't see, for now at least, direct influence between these episodes, which are highly regrettable, and medium and long-term planning of many countries in the area of peaceful uses of nuclear energy. There is a very strong trend which is driven by other factors which have to do with energy security, technological considerations, and so on."

The strategic dimension

For India, the IAEA Director General's public endorsement carries strategic weight beyond its immediate content. India's nuclear journey has been distinctive in international terms — characterised by the 1974 and 1998 nuclear tests, by the long period of nuclear isolation that followed, by the 2008 Nuclear Suppliers Group waiver that ended that isolation, and by the 2010 CLND Act that, despite the policy intention, created a 15-year impasse in foreign nuclear supply.

The SHANTI Act is, in effect, the legislative resolution of that impasse. International endorsement of the legislation — from the IAEA at the multilateral level, from individual partner governments bilaterally, and from the international nuclear-industry vendors who are now expected to engage substantively with the Indian market — completes the cycle. The Grossi remarks are one of the most significant such endorsements yet articulated publicly.

For the IAEA, deeper engagement with a country that intends to scale nuclear capacity twelvefold over two decades is, equally, a substantive expansion of the Agency's operational footprint. India's safeguards arrangement with the IAEA, signed under the 2008-09 framework, places its civilian nuclear facilities under IAEA inspection; the expansion of the civilian nuclear fleet will, by definition, expand the volume of IAEA work on the Indian side. Mr Grossi's "we are going to be working with India much more" is therefore a precise statement of operational reality, not merely a diplomatic courtesy.

The road ahead

The SHANTI Act is now on the statute book; the implementation rules under it are being drafted by the Department of Atomic Energy and the AERB. The first wave of private-sector investment commitments — joint ventures, technology agreements, financing arrangements — is expected through the second half of 2026 and into 2027. The international vendors most directly affected by the 15-year impasse will, over the same period, be evaluating whether the new framework is sufficient to support specific reactor-sale commitments.

For the 100 GW target itself, the operational arithmetic is demanding. Twelvefold expansion of installed nuclear capacity in 21 years requires sustained execution at a rate the Indian nuclear sector has not previously achieved. Whether this is delivered will depend on the speed of private-sector entry, the on-boarding of international technology, the availability of long-term project financing, the development of SMR-class options for distributed deployment, and the steady management of the regulatory and safety architecture that the AERB is now statutorily mandated to oversee.

For now, what the past several months have established is that the policy framework is in place and the international institutional response is favourable. Mr Grossi's endorsement is the most senior international signal yet that the cycle has begun. How rapidly the cycle delivers actual gigawatts on the ground — and how durably it sustains the safety and accountability standards that nuclear power demands — will be the substantive measure by which the SHANTI Act is judged over the coming years.