After months spent riding roughshod over protesters fighting the project in the state of Maharashtra, the Indian government has adopted a slightly different tune. The authorities say they will review and enhance safety features at the proposed plant, though they still insist “there is no alternative to nuclear power".
Residents of Jaitapur - the mega-plant's proposed home, south of Mumbai - are unimpressed by the government's arguments. “Do they take us to be fools?" asks Milind Desai, a doctor who practises in the nearby town of Mithgavane. “NPCIL [Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited] officials earlier tried to tell us that radiation is harmless because there is background radiation in nature. Now after the disaster in Japan, they suddenly tell us they'll put in extra safety precautions. Why should we trust them?"
The mistrust is increased by the opacity of India's nuclear establishment. The government's Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) owns NPCIL and also runs the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), where any citizen wishing to make a complaint about the nuclear industry must go. People cannot even use the Right to Information law to find out what is going on, as anything nuclear falls under the Official Secrets Act, making it exempt from transparency regulations.
Jaitapur's residents have protested for five years against the proposed complex of six reactors, each capable of generating 1,650 megawatts of power. The government has responded by jailing protestors and banning civil-society activists from entering the area - that was until the Fukushima incident showed the world that even safety-conscious Japan can fail to avert a serious nuclear accident. Read the full report here.
Source: Joydeep Gupta, China Dialogue.
