Atomic Energy Act, Patent Act & India’s Nuclear Self Reliance

Posted: Friday, Oct 24, 2003 at 0000 hrs IST
Updated: Friday, Oct 24, 2003 at 0000 hrs IST

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: Immediately after the earthquake in Gujarat, there were reports that the 440MW Kakrapara Atomic Power Station, a few hundred kms from Bhuj, the epicentre of the massive earthquake, continued to function normally; so also all the 14 other stations (total capacity 3000MW), these having in-built safety features designed especially to withstand severe earthquakes. This, along with what were demonstrated earlier at Pokran, adequately show the high-level indigenous expertise of the nation in nuclear and allied technology achieved over the past three/four decades. These achievements were possible due to the farsighted strategy pioneered by its founder-leader Dr Homi Bhabha and the able team around him.

A brief description of Dr Bhabha is in order. Let me quote his brother JJ Bhabha:

His immense latent talents blossomed soon after he joined Gonville and Cais College in Cambridge in October 1927 to take the Engineering Tripos. So great, however, was the impression made on him by the brilliant physicists and mathematicians working with Lord Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory that within a year he pleaded with his father to be permitted to switch from engineering to the Mathematics Tripos. He wrote with the passion of a boy of 18 thus: “I seriously say to you that business or a job as an engineer is not the thing for me. It is totally foreign to my nature and radically opposed to my temperament and opinions. Physics is my line...I am burning with a desire to do physics. I will and must do it some time. It is my only ambition, I have no desire to a ’successful’ man or the head of a big firm. There are other intelligent people who like that and let them do it (referring to the invitation from his uncle Sir Dorab Tata, then chairman of Tata Sons Ltd, to join Tisco). Dr Bhabha got a first class in engineering as promised to his father and then went for Mathematics Tripos with support from his father. In 1934 he explained to a friend on his philosophy of life thus: “I know quite clearly what I want of life. Life and my emotions are the only things I am conscious of. I love consciousness of life and I want as much of it as I can get. What comes after death no one knows. Nor do I care. Since therefore I cannot increase the content of life by increasing its duration, I...

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