As far as Taramati Vaghdhare is concerned, there is no question of accepting compensation to make way for the world's largest nuclear power plant. “If you want the land, make us stand on the land - shoot us - and then take the land,” said the feisty 53-year-old, wearing a blue and gold sari and gesturing with a spatula. In the yard outside her house, a young man sorted green mangoes of the prized Alphonso type from her family's orchards. “Our land is our mother. We can't sell her and take compensation,” said Vaghdhare, who was among villagers detained during recent protests against the plant. The stakes are high for chronically power-short India. The plant would eventually have six reactors capable of generating 9,900 megawatts of electricity - enough to provide power to 10 million Indian homes. Long-running opposition to the proposed plant at Jaitapur has hardened amid the unfolding nuclear crisis in Japan, with village posters depicting scenes of last month's devastation at the Fukushima plant and warning of what could be in store for this region in the Western Ghats north of Goa. Even if villagers and fishermen manage to derail the plant, India is unlikely to back down from its broader nuclear ambitions given surging power demand and a lack of alternatives. India suffers from a peak-hour power deficit of about 12 percent that acts as a brake on an economy growing at nearly nine percent and causes blackouts in much of the country. About 40 percent of Indians, or 500 million people, lack electricity. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh staked his political career on a 2008 deal with the United States that ended India's nuclear isolation dating to its 1974 test of a nuclear device, opening up a $150 billion civilian nuclear market. India now operates 20 mostly small reactors at six sites with a capacity of 4,780 MW, or three percent of its total power capacity. It hopes to lift its nuclear capacity to 7,280 MW by next year, more than 20,000 MW by 2020 and 63,000 MW by 2032 by adding nearly 30 reactors. Shortly after the earthquake and tsunami that crippled the plant at Fukushima and triggered a global rethink of nuclear power, Singh said India's atomic energy program was on track but regulators would review safety systems to ensure that plants could withstand similar natural disasters. “I do not believe that there is any panic reaction in terms of calling for a halt for the nuclear projects,” said M.R. Srinivasan, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission of India, who selected the Jaitapur site. “We will certainly review, in respect of new projects, the safety of those sites and the installations we propose to bring there in the context of an extreme, low probability but nonetheless possible natural event such as occurred in Fukushima,” he said. Little choice Whether the Jaitapur plant is built or not, India has little choice but to add a lot more nuclear power. While numerous thermal power projects are at various stages of development, environmental and land use restrictions mean power producers are having difficulty securing coal, which accounts for 60 percent of India's energy use. Gas output from the KG basin, for which India has high hopes, has lagged expectations, while competition for imports is intensifying. Alternatives including wind and solar are relatively expensive and lack the scale and storage capacity to provide base load supply. “We are getting increasingly concerned about India's energy position in the context of supply shortages in most fossil fuels,” Kotak Institutional Equities wrote in a recent note. While New Delhi is committed to nuclear power, India's democratically elected leaders are sensitive to public opinion. China, which is pressing ahead with its own ambitious nuclear program, is less constrained. Residents in Jaitapur are encouraged by the long history of civil disobedience in India and say they are bolstered in their argument by the crisis in Japan. “It only vindicates the doubts, views, we have been raising for the past few years,” said Mangesh Chavan, who lives nearby and works in agricultural development, referring to Fukushima. Activist Anna Hazare recently ended a five-day hunger strike after the government in Delhi gave in to his demand for a tougher anti-graft law. His campaign drew the support of thousands and comparisons to Mahatma Gandhi's protests and hunger strikes that helped end British colonial rule. In 2008, farmers in Singur in the state of West Bengal blocked Tata Motors from building a factory there to make it's ultra-low-cost Nano car. Praveen Gavankar, a farmer and leader of opposition to the nuclear plant, said villagers plan to start farming on the site and if the government tries to block them they are prepared to go to Delhi to protest.
