On the southern tip of India, barely 20 km from Kanyakumari and just across the water from Sri Lanka, the public-sector Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) is setting up two 1000-megawatt nuclear reactors – the largest such plants in the country. Though construction on both of the Russian-built reactors is currently behind schedule, NPCIL has already proposed to import four additional nuclear generators, for installation at the same site. To fulfil a mandatory step in the official environmental clearance process, on 2 June the Tamil Nadu State Pollution Control Board conducted a public hearing. From the outset, the distinct impression at the meeting was that the state administration was hoping merely to be done with an undesirable formality. What is more, they allowed NPCIL to use the hearing as a platform from which to promote the project and to make unsubstantiated claims about the reactors' safety.
But things did not go according to the official script. Locals of the area had been fed pro-nuclear rhetoric for years, and nearly 7000 people gathered to take advantage of the first official opportunity to put their own views on nuclear-energy production into the public record. Almost to an individual, they said that they were opposed to the project. As participant after participant spoke against the Koodankulam plan, the official in charge abruptly announced that NPCIL had clarified all the people's doubts, and declared the meeting closed. Contrary to the requirements of the law, the minutes of the meeting – what would enter the official record as the public's views – were not read out.
The current work at Koodankulam is the culmination of a deal signed back in 1988 between India and the then-Soviet Union. According to the agreement, the Soviet Union was to provide concessional state-to-state credit for the reactor, priced then at INR 47 billion. This was barely two years after the Chernobyl disaster, and the Soviet nuclear industry was desperate to improve its image. For its part, over the preceding decades, India's Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) had failed to deliver on its claims to power generation. In the early 1960s, DAE officials had predicted around 25,000 MW of installed capacity by 1987; in fact, by the mid-1980s it had only managed 1000 MW: the Koodankulam reactors would have more than doubled that figure. The deal, then, was to have been a fillip to both the Soviet and Indian nuclear industries. Unfortunately for both, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, project plans were shelved.
The project lay dormant for a time due to uncertainties in Russia; but with the improvement of the Russian economy, it was revived in June 1998. By then, the project's cost had risen to over INR 130 billion, for which Moscow again agreed to extend state credit. Once more, a significant factor in the resuscitation of the Koodankulam plan was the sorry state of the Russian nuclear establishment, which was suffering from the migration of skilled personnel to the West, as well as a dwindling number of orders. For its part, the DAE was keen on finding a country to break ranks and flout the international understanding that nuclear commerce was not to be conducted with India, given New Delhi's multiple nuclear-weapons tests conducted that very year.