Prof. Prabhat Ranjan CEO and Co-founder of a nuclear fusion company called ASPL Fusion. He is former Vice Chancellor of D Y Patil International University, Akurdi, Pune
This blog tries to summarize my research journey from Universe to Sun to Moon to Earth to Body to Brain.
[ This blog tries to summarize my research journey from Universe to Sun to Moon to Earth to Body to Brain. Some of this is covered in a talk I gave at IIASA, Vienna – https://youtu.be/327A01oYqdo ]
Continue reading “My Research Journey to Brain”He said, “You can go ahead. But I will live till 100 years at least.” He fell ten years short of his own promise. Remembering Dr. D. Y. Patil — Dada — and a photograph he would not allow to be taken until he had finished his tea.
In memory of Dr. D. Y. Patil — “Dada” — 22 October 1935 to 4 August 2026
We lost Dada today.
I met him for the first time on 25 April 2018, the day I joined as the founding Vice Chancellor of D Y Patil International University, Akurdi, Pune. I had gone to him with a request. At the time I was working on digital avatar technology, and I wanted to build a digital avatar of Dada — to preserve his voice, his presence, his way of speaking to young people, for the generations of students who would come long after him.
He listened. Then he smiled and said, “You can go ahead. But I will live till 100 years at least.”
Continue reading “He Finished His Tea, and Then Held My Hand”The Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor went critical at Kalpakkam in April. It is a good moment to ask what we actually mean when we say “thorium” — because it is not one technology but at least six distinct engineering routes, and all of them are answers to the same question: how does India get more U-233, sooner?
On the many roads from monazite sand to megawatt-hours — and where a fusion-driven neutron source fits in.
On 6 April 2026, the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor at Kalpakkam attained first criticality. For those of us who have spent our working lives around India’s nuclear and plasma programmes, it was a moment to sit with quietly. Construction began in 2004. First operation was once planned for 2010. The reactor is now running, and India has formally entered the second stage of the programme Homi Bhabha sketched in 1954.
I want to use that milestone to ask a question we do not ask often enough: when we say “thorium,” what exactly do we mean?
Continue reading “India’s Thorium Question Has More Than One Answer”She filled in the form honestly. Her details were sold before anyone read it. She was called by someone who sounded official and steered somewhere she had not chosen. At no point did her family attempt anything dishonest — and at no point did the system protect them.
In my last piece I wrote about parents who go looking for a shortcut, and about the ecosystem that has grown up to sell them one. There is a fair objection to that piece: most parents never make that call. What about them?
Continue reading “Your Child Is a Lead: The Trade in Honest Applicants”Every admission season, my phone begins to ring — polite requests, quietly confident that everything is negotiable. But buying a seat is not a single act of wrongdoing. It is a subscription to an ecosystem of agents, fixers and gatekeepers that does not end on admission day. It waits for the inspectors.
Every year, as admission season approaches, my phone begins to ring. Old acquaintances, distant relatives, friends of friends — all with the same carefully worded request. Could I “just have a word” with someone? Is there a “management quota”? What is the “arrangement”? The tone is always polite, often apologetic, and quietly confident that everything, in the end, is negotiable.
I understand the anxiety behind those calls. Parents are not villains. They love their children and they are terrified of a system that seems to offer very few seats and even fewer second chances. But somewhere between that love and that fear, a line gets crossed — and once enough people cross it, something worse than individual wrongdoing takes shape. An entire ecosystem grows around the crossing.
A single act of corruption is an event. What we have built in Indian education is an industry — and industries need supply chains. Around every competitive admission process, a service economy has quietly assembled itself: consultants who promise “guaranteed seats” for a fee, agents who know exactly whom to call, operators who manufacture domicile papers, sports certificates, disability certificates and community certificates on demand. There are people who arrange proxies for entrance examinations, people who leak question papers, and people whose entire business is knowing which official can be reached and at what price.
Each participant takes a modest cut and tells themselves a comfortable story. The consultant is only “guiding families.” The clerk is only “expediting a file.” The official is only “using discretion he is entitled to.” No one in the chain feels like a criminal, because the wrongdoing has been sliced thin enough that every individual slice looks almost respectable. This is precisely what makes an ecosystem so much harder to dismantle than a single scandal — there is no villain to arrest, only a habit to break.
Here is the part we speak about far less, and it is the part that troubles me most. The parent who paid to get a child in usually believes the transaction is over. It is not. The child has been admitted into an institution that has learned the same habit — and that institution must now face its own inspectors.
Anyone who has served in academic administration knows the ritual. Word arrives that a committee is coming. What follows has almost nothing to do with education. Laboratories that stood locked all year are opened and stocked overnight. Faculty are borrowed from neighbouring colleges for the day so that student-teacher ratios look respectable on paper. Attendance registers are reconstructed. Library invoices appear for books nobody has ever seen on a shelf. Hospitality is arranged with a generosity that no genuine academic visit could ever require. And in too many cases, the committee’s report is negotiated long before the committee has finished walking the corridors.
The same architecture appears at every level — affiliation, accreditation, ranking, approval for new programmes, renewal of existing ones. Wherever a stamp of approval carries value, a market forms to sell it. The people who benefit are rarely the students. They are the fixers, the facilitators and the gatekeepers who have discovered that in education, as in any regulated sector, the scarcest commodity is not knowledge but permission.
We have created a system where it is often easier to purchase the appearance of quality than to build the substance of it. Until that equation is reversed, nothing else we attempt will hold.
The most obvious casualty is the student who did everything right and lost a seat to someone who did not. That injustice deserves our anger. But the damage runs further.
Consider the student admitted through unfair means. They now sit in a classroom they were not prepared for, quietly struggling, often blamed for a failure that was arranged on their behalf. I have taught such students. Their misery is real, and it was purchased for them by people who loved them.
Consider the institution that passes inspection on the strength of a performance. It now has documentary proof of laboratories it does not run and faculty it does not employ. It has no incentive to build the real thing, because the paper version worked. Its degrees steadily lose meaning, and its honest graduates pay that price in the job market for the rest of their careers.
Consider the honest administrator — and there are many — who refuses to play. They watch neighbouring institutions climb rankings they do not deserve and attract students on reputations they have not earned. Over time, integrity begins to feel less like a principle and more like a competitive disadvantage. That, more than any single scam, is how a system rots: not when dishonest people prosper, but when honest people conclude that honesty is naive.
I have no interest in offering easy prescriptions for a problem this old. But four things seem to me worth insisting on.
Reduce discretion, and the market shrinks. Corruption lives wherever a human being can quietly say yes or no without explaining why. Centralised counselling, published cut-offs, machine-allocated seats and open waitlists have already cleaned up admissions wherever they have been implemented seriously. The lesson generalises.
Change how we inspect. A scheduled visit measures how well an institution prepares for visits. Unannounced inspections, randomised committee composition, continuous digital reporting of attendance and appointments, and verification against payroll and provident fund records would tell us far more about an institution than any two-day tour ever could.
Make the inspectors accountable too. Reports should be published. Committee members should be identifiable and rotated. A committee that certifies a facility later found not to exist should face consequences, not quiet reassignment. Accountability that stops at the institution’s gate is not accountability.
And, hardest of all, we must widen the definition of a good life. This entire ecosystem is fed by a national belief that a handful of institutions constitute the only doorway to a worthwhile future. It is not true, and it has never been true. In my own career I have worked alongside outstanding scientists and engineers from institutions no one would call famous, and I have met graduates of celebrated ones who never quite recovered from getting in the wrong way. As long as parents believe that a particular seat is the difference between their child’s success and ruin, some of them will pay for it. The demand side of corruption is built inside our heads.
I want to say this plainly, and without judgement. When you arrange a shortcut for your child, you are not only taking a seat from another family’s child. You are teaching your own child, in the most vivid way available to you, that rules apply to other people and that the right payment moves any obstacle. That lesson does not stay in the admission office. It follows them into their examinations, their workplaces and eventually into the decisions they will make about your grandchildren.
The seat you buy will be forgotten in a decade. The lesson will not.
I have spent my working life in laboratories and in universities, and I remain stubbornly optimistic about young Indians. They are capable of far more than the system currently asks of them. But they will only get an education system worth having if the adults around them — parents, teachers, administrators, inspectors and policymakers alike — decide that we would rather build something real than keep paying, in instalments, for its appearance.
After my NSRTC 2026 talk, one thought stayed with me: between the Nobel Prize and the Queen Elizabeth Prize lies a third kind of work — the solution built for a single person. It changes a life, never scales, and in the disability sector it may be the most important engineering of all.
Private fusion drew $4.5 billion in the last twelve months alone — more than any government’s fusion budget over the same period. India has the scientific base and now the legal opening. What it does not have is the capital.
For most of my working life, fusion was something that happened inside national laboratories. It was funded by governments, measured in decades, and defended — when it needed defending — on the grounds that the physics was worth knowing. I spent those years on ADITYA and on SST-1 at the Institute for Plasma Research, and before that at Saha Institute, on India’s first tokamak. Nobody in that world used the word “market.”
That world has changed, and the Fusion Industry Association’s 2026 survey documents the change with unusual clarity. It is worth reading carefully, and it is worth reading in India.
The FIA’s 2026 report counts 56 private fusion companies worldwide and $14.24 billion in cumulative declared funding. Of that, $4.48 billion arrived in the last twelve months alone — more than any single government’s fusion budget over the same period.
Continue reading “Fusion Has Become an Investment Class : India Now Has to Decide What Part It Wants to Play!”On 19 June 2026 Realta Fusion drew real current straight from a fusion plasma, no turbine involved. Prof. Prabhat Ranjan on direct energy conversion versus the steam turbine — what it changes for deuterium–tritium, why it is a magnetic-mirror story, and where it points for advanced, low-neutron fuels.
On 19 June 2026, Realta Fusion, working with the University of Wisconsin–Madison, drew a few amperes of current at around a hundred volts from charged particles streaming out of the ends of their WHAM mirror device — enough, in their own words, to light a few bulbs. It is worth pausing on how modest that sounds, and how significant it actually is.
This was the first time a private fusion company has converted the kinetic energy of a fusion-relevant plasma directly into electricity, without first turning it into heat. The team has been careful to say what it is not: it is neither net-electric production nor large-scale conversion of fusion-born power. That restraint is exactly why the result deserves attention. A real current in a real circuit is a physical fact, not a press release.
I want to use the occasion to discuss something the fusion community does not talk about often enough — the rather nineteenth-century machine sitting at the heart of almost every twenty-first-century power plant we propose to build.
