New Delhi: External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar Friday hinted at the Narendra Modi government’s plan to amend the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, 2010, which had been a sore point for American and French companies.
Admitting that the current law “has not instilled confidence in the international community”, he said India has tried options to bridge the gap but has now come to the position that maybe the law needs to be amended.
Speaking at the Global Technology Summit 2025 in New Delhi, Jaishankar also suggested private sector participation in the nuclear energy sector, saying there is already a strong expression of interest.
The two-day event has been organised by the Ministry of External Affairs and Carnegie India.
“I think it is the declared position of the government that we need to look at the liability law because, clearly, the current law has not instilled confidence in the international nuclear industry for nuclear projects to take place in this country,” he said.
“That is a fact of life. We have tried various options in the hope that we could bridge that gap, and I think we have come to the conclusion that maybe that liability law needs to be amended because, at the end of the day, what is the good of having a great initiative if it does not deliver goods on the ground?” he asked.
“So, what we started off in 2005 as the opening of our pathway, if it has not produced the kind of outcomes envisaged 20 years ago, we should have the honesty to ask ourselves, what is to be done differently? I would say that this government has the courage to ask that question,” he added.
In her budget speech this year, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had said the development of at least 100 GW of nuclear energy by 2047 was essential for India’s energy transition efforts.
On 2 April, Union Minister of State Jitendra Singh said in Parliament that the government has constituted committees with members from the Department of Atomic Energy, Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, NITI Aayog and the Ministry of Law and Justice to discuss amendments to the Atomic Energy Act and the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act (CLNDA) to allow private companies to participate in building and commissioning future nuclear reactors.
It was expected that the government would bring in amendments during the recently concluded Parliament session but it did not.
India has been pushing for partnerships, if not in large nuclear power projects, then in small modular reactors (SMRs), roughly one-third the size of a normal reactor.
Meanwhile, Jaishankar also said India’s “complementary partners” are in the West, terming the current state of geoeconomics as an “opportunity” for New Delhi to strike trade deals with the US, UK and European Union (EU) for its own benefit.
“In terms of the other T (tariffs), what it has done is it has focused our own minds on the need for correcting the skewed nature of our openness to the global economy. Many of us have argued for a long time that our more complementary partners are actually in the West,” the minister said, while speaking with Rudra Chaudhuri, director of Carnegie India.
“These (the West) are economies where real growth is possible. These are much more open, they are market economies, there is a certain contractual underpinning to everything you do. These are much more competitive economies than those to the East of us,” the minister added.
Jaishankar highlighted that three trade deals under negotiation, with the US, UK and EU, would change India’s position in the globe, especially given the “high technological” nature of these economies.
His comments come as the global churn unleashed by the “reciprocal” tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump has hit the markets and economies hard.
Trump Wednesday paused the additional individual tariffs imposed by the US on over 60 countries, above the 10 percent baseline, following the negative impacts on American markets. However, he continued to increase the tariffs on China, which will be 145 percent on all imports of Chinese goods.
Beijing has retaliated with its own set of tariffs against the US, currently pegged at 84 percent, leading to the continuation of the trade war among the world’s two largest economies. In this situation, India has been working with the White House to announce a bilateral trade deal by the end of autumn.
The proposed deal was first announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to Washington this February. At the end of March, a US delegation led by Assistant Trade Representative for South and Central Asia Brendan Lynch was in New Delhi to take forward the negotiations for the conclusion of the deal.
Trump has raged at India’s “high tariffs”, labelling New Delhi as a “tariff king”. The threat of higher tariffs, up to 27 percent on Indian exports, has put into focus the potential impact of a no deal scenario for New Delhi, given that the US is its largest export market.
Indian exports to the US touched $77 billion in 2023-2024 financial year, which was more than double those to the next country, UAE.
Jaishankar said that for once, there is more urgency in completing these trade deals from the Indian side than the negotiating partners. “We are trying to get the other side to speed it up,” he said, with the US being “fairly quick” in responding to the negotiations on the table.
While the India-US trade deal is expected this autumn, the deal with the EU is aimed to be concluded before the end of this year, while the UK deal has just been relaunched.
ThePrint is a digital partner for Global Technology Summit 2025
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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Recall Union Carbide. More recently, the vast compensation the US government extracted from British Petroleum for the
Deepwater Horizon oil spill, where there was environmental damage but only a handful of lives lost. Also recall Fukushima.