The Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and all the nascent nuclear businesses are fielding a whole array of agents to peddle their never attainable promises and promote their selfish interests.
Even as the SHANTI Bill was getting passed in the Parliament, an actor-turned politician from Tamil Nadu, Kamal Haasan, raised a few question on the nuclear issue in the Rajya Sabha. Those questions were not about people’s safety, or the health of our environment, or the financial propriety of the Indian nuclear program.
Instead, he wanted to the know the government’s timeline “for scaling up nuclear capacity from 8.88 GW to 100 GW under the Nuclear Energy Mission for Viksit Bharat,” the timeline “for construction of thorium-based Advanced Heavy Water Reactors to harness India’s thorium reserves,” and the timeline “for commencing construction of two additional Fast Breeder Reactors at Kalpakkam.”
Kamal Haasan’s eagerness and enthusiasm about all these timelines could only emanate from some corporate houses’ boardrooms and definitely not from ordinary people’s interests. His interest in leveraging India’s thorium reserves is very intriguing. But he does not care if that booty will be eventually handed over to Danis and Banis. Kamal does not bother about the inordinate time and cost overrun of the 500 MW PFBR project being erected at Kalpakkam but wants to know when additional Fast Breeder Reactors would be set up there. All of a sudden, Kollywood’s ‘Big Boss’ becomes a ‘Big Nuclear Boss’!
One wonders who he is asking all this information for. With the SHANTI-led privatization of the nuclear sector, many politicians, public representatives, bureaucrats, technocrats and media persons will become spokespersons, PROs, lobbyists, middlemen, commission agents, brand ambassadors, and advertisement models for the nuclear industry. All these pimpy personalities could make a killing when the public sector’s sacred cow becomes the private sector’s milking cow.
Consider another instance. Amitabh Kant, former CEO of Niti Aayog, contends that “energy consumption is seeing a massive spike as AI and the … data centres are seeing increased uptake and investment,” and “in the past few days, India has attracted $70 bn worth of investments in this space.” He does not give any more details about this whopping sum of 70 billion US dollars. He says that India has moved away from “state-monopoly model towards a safety-first, investment-friendly regime” (The Times of India, December 29, 2025).
As a Tamil proverb puts it, if you marry a ghost, you should be ready to eat a corpse. Be ready, my Motherland, for more and more Kamals and Kants, and cock-and-bull stories.
National Alliance of Anti-nuclear Movements (NAAM)
