The recent heart paining earthquake and tsunami in Japan that has led to a nuclear disaster that is still unfolding in Japan as an aftermath, speaks volumes of how fragile nuclear plants are and how dangerous such leakages can be. Any case of nuclear meltdown would cause leakage of radiations which not only can lead to a high death toll and permanent physical and mental disorders but in the long run can make the vicinity uninhabitable for tens of decades. India, which is blindly following a dream of going the nuclear way, is largely ignoring the threats that these reactors bring with themselves! The Three Mile and Chernobyl disasters during the eighties are testimonies to catastrophes that can be caused by such plants. And it is not that this is something new for India – in August 2010, the Journal of Contemporary Asia reported that between 1993 and 1995, more than 120 hazardous nuclear accidents took place in India. And then, there are protests which are already being organised in Jaitapur in Maharashtra after adverse effect of nuclear plants were seen on the ecology. Even if one ignores the Jaitapur protests, what comes as a surprise is how our government seems to have forgotten the biggest disaster of all time in Indian history. People have not even come out of the Bhopal Gas tragedy and mind you, there was nothing nuclear in that disaster!

The whole nuclear saga began in the October of 2008, when we signed the controversial and much criticised 1-2-3 deal with the US. This deal opened a $250 billion nuclear reactor market for India and today we are finding companies (mostly American and European) waiting for their contracts. This brings me to the biggest contract we signed with Areva that furthered our dream of becoming nuclear powered nation by adding a 9,000-MW plant at Jaitapur in the Konkan region in Maharashtra. As it is said that the devil is in the details, interestingly the Konkan coast is located in the seismic belt of the nation and is categorised under the high damage risk zone. For the record, in the last two decades, this zone has experienced a whopping number of 92 earthquakes, of which three were major, with the highest being measured at 6.3 on the Richter scale in 1993. And on the top of this, we are using a very controversial and unapproved nuclear reactor for this plant. As of now, we’ve more than