India · Nuclear energy

Promises made. Promises missed.

For seventy years, India has announced ambitious nuclear capacity targets. The reactors have rarely arrived on schedule. Here is every target since 1954, plotted against what was actually built.

Aniket Shevade · April 2026 ·

8.78 GW installed today
100 GW target for 2047
91.2 GW gap, even after currently under-construction reactors

The promise vs. the build

The black line is what India actually built — total nuclear capacity each year. The dotted line continues it through reactors currently under construction, assuming on-time delivery. Each coloured dot is a capacity target that someone announced. The further the dot is above the black line, the wider the miss.

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Layers

— · Scroll or pinch the chart to zoom. Drag to pan. Hover any dot for a quick preview; click a coloured dot to pin its announcement, or click a small black dot on the line to see which reactor commissioned that year.

How to read a target

Marker size shows how formal the announcement was: large dots are Plan, Act or Budget commitments; smaller dots are speeches and aspirational visions. The thin red line connecting each target back to its announcement year is its promise vector — it shows when the target was made and how high above the actual baseline it sat at that moment.

Reactor by reactor

Each bar shows a single reactor's evolution: cream where it was a planned proposal, grey while under construction, black once operational, red after shutdown. The lighter grey segments at the right are projected — construction-start plus 8 years, the indigenous PHWR median build time. The red ring, where present, marks the year the reactor was originally promised — only four reactors carry a primary-source-cited original deadline.

planned under construction operational shut down planned-from original deadline currently expected criticality reached shutdown

Sources & references

Every datapoint plotted above is traceable to one of the following primary or named secondary works.

Reactor commissioning & build status

Bhabha-era target announcements (1948–1966)

Five-Year Plans & the Integrated Energy Policy

Indo-US deal era projections

Parliamentary & ministerial statements

Executive announcements & Union Budgets

Central Electricity Authority roadmap

Statutory background

Generated —. —.

Confidence levels

Every row in the underlying CSVs carries a confidence tag:

  • verified — the exact figure was directly read from the named source.
  • secondary — the figure is attested in a named secondary work (Ramana Power of Promise; Wikipedia citing a Plan document).
  • inferred — the row exists but no specific MW number is asserted (programme architecture; planned reactors with no dates).

Reading the markers — formal vs. aspirational

Each target marker is sized by how formal the announcement was. The bigger the dot, the firmer the commitment behind the number:

  • Largest dots — Plan or Act commitments; explicit parliamentary answers; Union Budget speeches; CEA Roadmap. (Example: 100 GW by 2047, Budget 2025-26.)
  • Mid-sized dots — DAE / NPCIL projections released to public; AEC Chair vision documents; PM-level vision speeches with explicit numbers.
  • Smaller dots — speeches with explicit numbers but conditional or aspirational framing. The 470 GW (PM Manmohan Singh, 2009) and 412 GW (Anil Kakodkar, 2008) figures sit here. They are toggled off by default to keep the main view legible.

Projection layer

The dotted line continues the actuals series into the near future based on currently under-construction reactors. The projection comes from scripts/build_json.py: each UC reactor rolls into installed capacity the year after its current_expected_completion (NPCIL / BHAVINI declared date). Where that field is missing, the fallback is construction_start + 10 years — the post-2000 PHWR median (computed from 13 reactors in data/reactors.csv). The "Apply historical slippage" toggle reads the parallel annual_capacity_slippage5y series, which adds 5 years to every UC commissioning year — a rough median documented slippage on Indian PHWR projects since 1990. Off by default.

Source typology

Targets are tagged by where the announcement appeared: Five-Year Plan, Budget speech, parliamentary Q&A, vision document, press release, speech, book, interview, or DAE Annual Report.

Known gaps

The dataset is honest about what's missing — see gaps.md. Highest-priority re-extractions: Five-Year Plan nuclear chapter targets (4th–12th), DAE Annual Report forward-outlook series, pre-2018 ministerial parliamentary answers.