The Hindu Business Line : Private play in nuclear energy

THE CHAIRMAN OF Tata Power, Mr Ratan Tata, ignited an interesting debate last week on private sector participation in the nuclear energy programme when he said that his company was ready to foray into this area if and when the government allowed it. As a member of the Prime Minister's delegation to the United States last month, he had had a first hand view of the momentous change in nuclear policy that Dr Manmohan Singh was proposing. The offer he made to the US President, Mr George Bush, was that in return for international support for India's nuclear energy programme, India would be ready to remove the cloak that had firmly wrapped the country's nuclear installations for the past 30 years. Civilian nuclear energy facilities would be opened to international inspection and safeguards, he promised, if the world would lift the ban on the supply of nuclear fuel to reactors in India and on building power plants.

The context and logic for Mr Tata's proposal are clear. Here was the Government making known that it would open up this field to foreign suppliers of fuel or even possibly to investors in entire nuclear power plants. If that were done, what would be the rationale for keeping the realm out of bounds for the domestic private sector? The short answer to that is: There is none. In the three decades since the former Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, invited international sanctions by testing nuclear devices at Pokhran in 1974, the Indian nuclear energy programme has chugged slowly along a lonely track. With limited domestic resources of natural uranium, the country chose a three-stage development, first with heavy water rectors using natural uranium, the second with fast breeder reactors that would feed on the plutonium generated in the first phase of development, and the third with thorium reactors. Intelligently-conceived though it was, the programme, which was put through the aegis of the public sector Nuclear Power Corporation, never attained the desired pace. Its target had been to create 10,000 MW of capacity by the year 2000; yet, only this year it has managed to cross 3,000 MW.

Technology appeared to be an initial hurdle; when that was overcome, financial and organisational energy were found wanting, and the ambitious programme that the world was watching with great interest moved at a listless pace. The question that the political fraternity will need to ask itself is whether this programme must indeed continue to plod on or whether a new zip can be infused into it by allowing the private sector into the ring. For guidance one has the analogy of the telecom sector, whose landscape has changed unrecognisably in just ten years with energetic private sector participation. For those who will clutch at straws and invoke national security issues to keep the nuclear field closed, the telecom sector again affords a telling lesson. The mobile phone was for long cited a threat and kept out of sensitive areas such as Jammu and Kashmir; yet it has rather time and again, in various theatres, proved useful in tracking and pinning down the same terrorists. The Government will do well to look dispassionately at all means to enhance investments in nuclear power even as it puts in place the necessary safeguards. The private sector can no more be taboo.

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