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21 August 2024 at 10:20:16 am

Tearful Harvest

Despair once again prevails in Maharashtra’s onion belt as angry farmers have launched protests across Nashik, Sambhaji Nagar and Solapur in wake of onion prices crashing to absurdly low levels. For cultivators who spent months battling erratic weather, rising fertiliser costs and mounting debt, the arithmetic is devastating. At such prices, farmers are unable even to recover transportation costs, let alone repay loans or sustain their households. In the past, Governments in Delhi have risen...

Tearful Harvest

Despair once again prevails in Maharashtra’s onion belt as angry farmers have launched protests across Nashik, Sambhaji Nagar and Solapur in wake of onion prices crashing to absurdly low levels. For cultivators who spent months battling erratic weather, rising fertiliser costs and mounting debt, the arithmetic is devastating. At such prices, farmers are unable even to recover transportation costs, let alone repay loans or sustain their households. In the past, Governments in Delhi have risen and fallen over onion prices. In 1980, soaring onion prices contributed to public anger against the Janata Party government. In 1998, the BJP lost the Delhi Assembly elections amid voter fury over onions becoming prohibitively expensive. Few commodities possess such emotional resonance in Indian politics. Yet there is a cruel irony in India’s onion economy, namely that while consumers revolt when prices rise, farmers suffer when prices crash. Farmers in Maharashtra are demanding procurement at Rs. 32 per kg, while the state government has announced an assured procurement price of Rs. 1,580 per quintal. Leaders of the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi have openly challenged the Mahayuti government to show where procurement at those rates was actually taking place. Yet the crisis illustrates a larger structural failure that no emergency meeting can fully conceal. India’s onion economy remains trapped in a cycle of volatility. When production dips, governments rush to ban exports, impose stock limits and flood markets with imports to calm urban consumers. But when production surges, farmers are abandoned to market collapses. The result is a deeply distorted agricultural ecosystem where cultivators bear the risks while political actors chase short-term electoral optics. Maharashtra, which accounts for a substantial share of India’s onion production, has witnessed such turmoil repeatedly. The protests of 2018, when farmers dumped onions on roads in Nashik after prices crashed below cultivation costs, should have served as a warning. They did not. Nor did earlier agitations led by the Shetkari Sanghatana in the 1980s and 1990s, which highlighted the asymmetry between urban-centric policymaking and agrarian realities. The present crisis is especially troubling because it strikes at a moment of already fragile rural sentiment. Farmer indebtedness remains acute. Climate variability has made cultivation increasingly precarious while input costs have risen steadily. Against this backdrop, a market collapse becomes a social issue, feeding anger, migration and, in the worst cases, suicides. The answer lies not in episodic procurement announcements or reactive subsidies, but in deeper reforms. India requires better agricultural storage infrastructure, predictable export policies and decentralised food-processing networks that can absorb production gluts. Most importantly, policymakers must stop treating farmers merely as electoral constituencies to be placated during crises. The onion has often moved governments because it affects the urban middle class. But a republic that ignores the tears of those who grow it risks a far deeper reckoning.

Thorium and Energy Sovereignty

As geopolitical shocks expose India’s imported fuel dependence, the country’s vast thorium reserves may hold the key to long-term energy sovereignty.

India’s energy future may ultimately depend less on imported oil, solar panels or even foreign uranium, and more on a mineral buried quietly in its coastal sands: thorium.


For decades, thorium occupied a curious place in India’s energy discourse — celebrated in scientific circles, occasionally invoked in policy speeches, yet often dismissed as a distant technological dream. Critics argued that India’s ambitious three-stage nuclear programme, designed to eventually unlock thorium-based energy, was too slow, too expensive and too technologically complex for a country facing rapidly growing electricity demand. But changing geopolitical realities and emerging advances in thorium fuel technology may now be forcing a serious rethink.


Energy Security

In a recent podcast discussion, veteran nuclear scientist Dr. Anil Kakodkar once again articulated his long-held conviction that India cannot build true energy security merely on imported uranium. Coming from one of the principal architects of India’s nuclear establishment, this was not nostalgia for an old scientific idea. It was a strategic warning.


The Russia-Ukraine conflict, turbulence in global energy markets and growing geopolitical fragmentation have reminded nations across the world that fuel dependence eventually becomes strategic dependence. Europe’s energy vulnerabilities after the Ukraine war demonstrated how quickly supply chains can become instruments of geopolitical pressure. India, despite its growing economy and technological ambitions, remains heavily dependent on imported oil, gas and critical energy resources.


The Indo-US nuclear agreement certainly opened access to international uranium markets and improved the performance of Indian nuclear reactors. But imported uranium, however useful in the short term, cannot alone provide the foundation for India’s century-long energy future. Dependence on external fuel supplies always carries strategic and diplomatic risks.


This is where thorium becomes important — not merely as a nuclear fuel, but as an instrument of long-term national sovereignty.


India possesses one of the world’s largest thorium reserves, particularly in the monazite sands along its southern coastline. Recognising this reality, Homi Jehangir Bhabha designed India’s famous three-stage nuclear programme in the 1950s. The logic was simple though technologically demanding: begin with uranium-fuelled reactors, develop fast breeder systems and eventually transition toward thorium-based fuel cycles capable of producing Uranium-233 for sustained nuclear power generation.


The problem was always time.


Thorium itself cannot directly power reactors in the way uranium does. It requires conversion through advanced nuclear processes before becoming a usable fuel. Critics therefore questioned whether India could afford to wait decades for thorium technologies to mature while the world rapidly moved toward other energy alternatives. But recent developments suggest that the thorium timeline may not remain as distant as once assumed.


Thorium Utilization

A startup associated with advanced thorium fuel development, reportedly advised by Dr. Kakodkar, has attracted attention for developing ANEEL — a hybrid thorium fuel approach that seeks to combine thorium with slightly enriched uranium in heavy-water reactor systems. The significance of this idea lies not in replacing India’s existing nuclear infrastructure overnight, but in potentially accelerating thorium utilisation through reactor technologies already familiar to India’s nuclear establishment. This could represent an important strategic shift.


India’s Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor programme is among the most mature in the world. These reactor systems, while traditionally based on natural uranium, also offer flexibility for experimenting with advanced fuel cycles involving thorium and slightly enriched uranium. If hybrid thorium fuels can function efficiently within such systems, India may not need to wait several decades for fully mature Stage-3 thorium reactors before beginning meaningful thorium utilisation.


In such a model, imported enriched uranium would function not as a permanent dependency, but as a catalyst for unlocking India’s own thorium reserves. That changes the strategic equation significantly.


The larger debate here is not merely about reactor design. It concerns the future shape of India’s energy independence.


India’s electricity demand is expected to rise dramatically in the coming decades. Artificial intelligence infrastructure, electric mobility, semiconductor manufacturing, data centres and urban expansion will require enormous quantities of stable electricity. Solar and wind energy will remain essential components of India’s clean-energy transition, but intermittent renewable sources alone cannot sustain a large industrial economy requiring round-the-clock power.


This is why nuclear energy is once again returning to global policy discussions as a source of reliable low-carbon baseload electricity. Countries across Europe, North America and Asia are reassessing nuclear strategies in the face of climate pressures and energy insecurity. In such a world, India’s thorium programme may no longer appear like a futuristic scientific detour. It could emerge as a major long-term strategic advantage.


Yet caution remains necessary.


Thorium is not a magical solution to India’s energy problems. Important technological, regulatory and economic challenges remain unresolved. Fuel fabrication, reprocessing, reactor economics, safety protocols and waste management will require sustained investment, rigorous testing and long-term political commitment. Commercial viability cannot be assumed merely because pilot-scale technological progress appears promising.


India must also avoid the temptation of technological triumphalism. The country has often announced ambitious scientific visions faster than it has built durable industrial ecosystems around them. Thorium success will depend not only on scientists, but equally on policy continuity, financing, regulatory stability and public trust in nuclear energy.


Nevertheless, the renewed discussion around thorium is important because it shifts the national conversation away from short-term electricity generation toward long-term civilisational planning. Dr. Kakodkar’s persistence on the issue now appears less like technological stubbornness and more like strategic foresight. He understood early that energy security is not simply about producing electricity today; it is about preserving national autonomy for the next hundred years.


For decades, thorium was seen as India’s distant nuclear dream. In an increasingly uncertain energy world, it may well become India’s most strategic scientific asset.


(The writer is a former scientific officer with the Department of Atomic Energy. Views personal.)

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