The Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) just released its report for the year ending March 2012 on the activities of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB). The AERB was set up in 1983, under the Atomic Energy Act, to carry out regulatory and safety functions of India’s nuclear assets. The CAG’s inquiry was limited to the ability of the AERB to discharge its duties regarding radiation safety, emergency preparedness, liaison with other international nuclear safety bodies, and the regulatory system that exists in the country to enable the AERB to perform its functions more effectively.
The findings of the report were, to put it mildly, highly unsatisfactory – in a criteria set of eight parameters, the AERB failed in all of them. Admittedly, a large portion of the blame falls on the central government for reasons we will get into later. The CAG was given the usual bureaucrat-ese response expected, “While there were no specific assurances giving time-lines within which our recommendations would be acted upon, we were assured that these were being looked into.”
The fundamental failures of the AERB, and through them the Government of India, (GoI) were:
In simple terms, these grievances mean that there is no proper framework established in India to build, operate, and maintain nuclear and radiological facilities, and if they existed, there is no oversight or verification. Thus, if there were a radiation leak at Kaiga, it would be up to NPCIL, the operator, to locate the problem, solve it, and do the requisite damage control – a tall order in a system that does not even have a framework to begin with.
While the CAG made recommendations to Parliament on what the AERB should do to immediately improve nuclear safety standards in India, they are nothing either Parliament, the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), or the AERB have not heard before. The problem is even more fundamental and lies in the very structure of the nuclear conclave in India. As I had written in an article investigating the feasibility of privatisation of nuclear power in India, the GoI has conflated secrecy with security, and in the early days of the republic, centralised all powers, through the DAE, to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). As the CAG also pointed out, India’s nuclear hierarchy is a problem in more efficient and safer management of nuclear resources. While the CAG specifically mentioned that the AERB’s subservience to the DAE created “grave risks” and advocated that the AERB be designated as an independent body (an IAEA first principle of nuclear regulation) and given absolute authority over nuclear regulatory affairs, this sentiment can be taken further:
These arguments are not new – many have been making similar demands since the mid-1990s, former AERB chairman A. Gopalakrishnan being one of them, along with many scientists such as Biswarup Banerjee and Nataraja Sarma. However, the GoI has not seen the need to act on any of these recommendations. This is a real pity because such reforms would have taken the wind out the anti-nuclear activists’ sails while simultaneously improving the country’s nuclear account-keeping and finally paving the way for a true nuclear renaissance in India.
To be fair, the absence of traditional nuclear book-keeping methods has not spelled disaster. Ad hoc or not, nuclear plants have been decommissioned uneventfully in India before. India has had relatively few nuclear accidents so far, none beyond Level 3 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES). None of this, however, is an argument against making nuclear regulation stricter and more transparent for little extra cost. The creation of decommissioning and safety protocols by each nuclear power plant unnecessarily duplicates labour and costs. Furthermore, such open and objective standards would allow the expansion of the nuclear power industry to private and even international hands, bringing in more players and giving a much-needed boost to India’s energy production. Strict and transparent standards would boost not just national, but international confidence in the Indian nuclear energy market. The only ruffled feathers would be in the by-now-ossified bureaucratic fiefdoms under the existing hierarchy.
Appu Soman explains in his latest book how Indian policy-making has a certain through-the-looking-glass (as in Alice and Lewis Carroll) effect. His book restricted itself to foreign policy, but it is no stretch of the imagination to extend that descriptor to all elements of government “thinking” and policy in India. There is little downside to implementing nuclear reforms. For the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), now in power, it would merely mean a continuation of the course it had set for India with the signing of the Indo-US nuclear deal. For the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), nuclear reforms dovetail nicely with their image as nuclear hawks – what better way to cultivate that image further than by advocating nuclear reform? The country will certainly sleep easier, knowing that its nuclear assets are under tight watch. The anti-nuclear activists will see many of their demands met, perhaps even winning over a few minds. It is only the bureaucrats in the various departments who will see their satrapies vanish, their budgets shrunk, and their powers curbed that will have something to complain about. Ultimately, this might simply be what Dorothy Wainright (Yes, Prime Minister) calls a clash of the political “will” and the administrative “won’t,” a powerful force much underestimated in politics.
This article appeared on Niti Central on August 28, 2012.