Six decades after physicist Homi Bhabha sketched out an audacious three-stage nuclear roadmap for a newly independent India, the country has quietly crossed the threshold into Stage II.
Not with fanfare, but with a controlled, self-sustaining reaction igniting inside a reactor on the Tamil Nadu coast.
On April 6, 2026, India’s Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) at Kalpakkam attained criticality, the point at which a nuclear reactor sustains a continuous chain reaction on its own, a defining step in the country’s civil nuclear journey.
