Earlier this month, on 8 May 2026, the Dutch fusion community gathered at DIFFER in Eindhoven for the third edition of Dutch Fusion Day. Around two hundred participants — from VDL on the established-industry side to Somni Solutions on the start-up side, together with TU/e, DIFFER and BigScienceNL as conveners — spent the day asking a single, very practical question: what does the Netherlands need to do, together, to be ready to build, supply, and benefit from fusion reactors?
The framing on the event’s own retrospective page is striking in its bluntness.
I read that line several times. It is, I think, exactly the sentence India’s fusion community needs to internalise — and the reason I believe we should now have an India Fusion Day.
The Netherlands does not have a tokamak the size of SST-1. It does not have an ITER-class fabrication base. What it has is DIFFER, a strong materials and plasma-wall-interactions community at Eindhoven, a handful of serious startups, and an industrial machine-building culture — VDL, ASML’s suppliers, semiconductor precision shops — that is now being courted by Proxima Fusion in Germany, Renaissance Fusion in France, UKFE’s STEP programme in Britain, and IFMIF-DONES in Spain.
What the Dutch organisers did with Dutch Fusion Day is simply this: they put the buyers and the sellers in the same room for one day a year. That is the entire formula — one day, one venue, a tight programme, public materials, and a room engineered for partnership conversations rather than press releases. It works because it is small enough to be honest. Two hundred people cannot do a ribbon-cutting; they can only do business.
When I look at where India is today, I am convinced we have crossed a threshold that justifies — and frankly requires — a convening of the same kind. The SHANTI Act 2025 came into force this December. The IPR fusion roadmap is published. PFBR achieved first criticality at Kalpakkam in April. A real private fusion ecosystem is now visible. This is no longer a community of three labs and one diaspora WhatsApp group. It is a sector. And sectors need a forum.
What would such a forum actually look like in India? What would it do, who would host it, and why must it happen now rather than after SST-Bharat is built? Those are the questions I want to answer next.