Nuclear Energy

extremely sensitive material used in nuclear weapons as a booster. cdlxxviii Clearly, the DAE is telling
a cock-and-bull story, and in the process, tying itself up in knots.
Challenging India's Nuclear Dictatorship in the Courts
It is commonsense that safety issues at India's nuclear installations have nothing to do with
the safety of the country, and information about these issues should be shared with the people of the
country. If India's atomic energy establishment is denying us information about these issues, it is
clearly violative of the democratic fabric of our country. If it is using the Atomic Energy Act of
1962 to deny us this information, then such an interpretation of this Act is violative of our
fundamental rights, and is unconstitutional. Because an accident at a nuclear reactor can kill lakhs
of people and render huge areas uninhabitable for centuries, because it is affecting our very Right
to Life, we have a fundamental right to know whether all is well at India's nuclear installations, it
cannot be left to the whims of our bureaucrats and politicians. Why don't we invoke the Right to
Life guaranteed to us by the Constitution of India and ask the Supreme Court of India to end the
nuclear dictatorship prevailing in the country? It has been tried by some of India's most eminent
lawyers, but unfortunately our courts have upheld the dictatorial powers conferred on the Atomic
Energy Commission under this Act.
Following news-reports in mid-1996 that the AERB under the chairmanship of Dr.
Gopalakrishnan had compiled more than 130 issues affecting the safety of our nuclear
establishments in the country, the well-respected human rights organisation People's Union for Civil
Liberties (PUCL) filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in August 1996 in the Bombay High Court.
Citing the grounds of Right to Life and Right to Know, the PUCL petition sought, amongst others,
disclosure of the adverse report of the AERB, for a direction to the Union Government to make the
AERB an independent body so that it might act as an effective watchdog for nuclear safety in the
country, and for declaring section l8 of the Atomic Energy Act unconstitutional as it confers on the
Central Government untrammeled powers for withholding from the public information about the
working of India's nuclear power plants. The Sarvodaya Mandal of Mumbai represented by Dr Usha
Mehta, the noted Gandhian and freedom-fighter, also filed a petition in support of the PUCL
petition.
The two PILs were heard at length at the stage of admission by a Bench presided over by the
then Chief Justice M B Shah. Senior officials of the country's nuclear establishment, including Dr
R. Chidambaram, the chairman of the AEC and secretary of the DAE, filed bulky affidavits,
opposing the petitions. In his affidavit, Dr R. Chidambaram invoked the provisions of Section 18 of
the Atomic Energy Act and stated that the document was a secret document as it related to nuclear
installations, and went on to say that publication of the document “will cause irreparable injury to
the interests of the State and will be prejudicial to national security."
It is important to note that the petitioners did not ask for any information about India's
nuclear arsenal or its storage site or anything related to India's national security and had only
expressed a genuine concern that there were not enough safety precautions in nuclear power stations
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