“To meet the rising aspirations of our people, the supply of affordable clean energy will be one of our foremost national challenges,” India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said this year, “nuclear energy will remain an essential and increasingly important element of our energy mix.”

India has bold plans for its nuclear industry – 470GW by 2050, Dr Singh says, more than the entire world can produce now - but today, with the lights still flickering out, the country is finding its nuclear ambitions frustrated on every front.

Plans for new power plants are being resisted by violent protest, existing ones are stricken by radiation leaks, and uranium mines are plagued by reports of thievery and smuggling.

And high on a hill in a tiny corner of the country, one woman is holding out against the might of her government’s will.

81-year-old Spility Langrin Lyngdoh has lived in the village of Domiasiat in the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya, longer than modern India has existed.

Her father bought this land decades ago - his grave is a few hundred metres from the home where she now sits - and Spility has spent almost her entire life here.

She wants it to remain as a home for her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

But beneath the hills her father bought lies uranium, more than 9,500 tonnes the Indian government estimates, between eight and 47 metres underground: the “largest, richest, near-surface and low-cost sandstone-type uranium deposit discovered in India so far”.

The state-run Uranium Corporation of India Limited is anxious to begin commercial mining as soon as possible. It plans two open-cut mines over 10 square kilometres.

“Site activities are expected to start soon,” the corporation says, perhaps more in hope than expectation.

During the 1990s, the UCIL set up an exploratory mine adjacent to Spility’s property, they set up a camp on her land, and proposed building a road through her village to the mine.

They came, with a contract, asking her to sell.

“They asked me to sign their piece of paper,” Spility says, “but I refused. This is the land of my family, I should not sell it.”

Spility bargains from a position of unusual strength. She is a member of Meghalaya’s Khasi tribe, from whom these hills get their name.

As a ‘scheduled tribe’, her people are recognised under India’s constitution, and are empowered with land rights no government of the day can override.

But Spility and her family stand alone. There were once more people in Domiasiat. The village had a school and half a dozen families. Gradually, however, they left, seeking work and education in distant cities. The school closed a few years ago, and the building has almost collapsed.

The only ones left, Spility’s family live in a hardscrabble collection of huts overlooking the valleys of the land they own.

Their village remains beyond roads and running water and mobile phone coverage.

The government promised electricity, and, three years ago brought poles, but no wires, and nothing’s happened since.

The Lyngdoh family may one day sell, or not. Regardless, India is depending on a nuclear future.

Almost every sector of India craves power: villages want it connected, industry requires factors more of it, and the country’s rising middle class demands it round-the-clock.

Already short _ massive blackouts strike almost daily as demand outstrips supply _ without serious reform, the deficiency will only grow. 400 million Indians still live without electricity, and the government has ambitious plans to electrify the 100,000-odd Indian villages, like Domiasiat, still off the grid.

While coal-powered plants will dominate for decades, indigenous coal supplies are too small, and imports too expensive, for coal alone to satisfy growing demand.

Currently, India has 20 nuclear reactors operating in six plants, providing about three per cent of the country’s energy. But 44 more reactors are either slated for construction or are already being built. By 2050, India wants a quarter of its energy to be nuclear.

Dr Singh said India could produce 470 GW of nuclear power by then “if the country thinks big and executes its plans correctly”.

India can’t do it alone, however. Without substantial domestic supplies of uranium, India buys it from France, Russia, and Kazakhstan.

And now Australia, with 40 per cent of the world’s mineable high-grade uranium, is set to become a significant nuclear partner.

Labor’s decision last year to allow uranium sales to India, after a decades-long ban, has delighted local authorities, and bureaucrats from both sides are currently thrashing out a safeguards agreement, a negotiation expected to take up to two years.

But for all of its ambition, and its government’s strident rhetoric, India’s nuclear industry is one beset by problems, both in its current operation and in its plans for expansion.

Security is weak.

Stolen uranium is regularly trafficked in this part of India.

In January, police in Assam recovered a homemade bomb and more than 1.5 kilograms of uranium from members of the separatist militant United Liberation Front of Assam.

In October 2012, six men described by police as “members of an international smuggling gang” were arrested with a pouch of uranium in Sasaram.

The Nuclear Threat Initiative has documented eight cases of theft and attempted trafficking of uranium ore, yellowcake, or low-enriched uranium in India between 2008 and 2011.

“Most instances of uranium theft seem to have occurred at local facilities in the north-eastern states of Assam and Meghalaya,” it says.

The thefts are usually carried out by members of local militias. Most often they know uranium is valuable, and believe they can sell it, but have little knowledge about the material they are smuggling, or the capacity to use it themselves.

In Domiasiat, the exploratory mine is closed, covered by four concrete slabs.

They sit, unmarked and unguarded, in the forest near to Spility’s home.

The bunker that Fairfax visited had been broken into, a small hole had been gouged in one corner, and the concrete pulled away.

India’s operating nuclear plants have a patchy safety record.

In two separate incidents within five weeks last year, 40 workers at the Rajasthan Atomic Power Station in Rawatbhata were exposed to radiation leakages.

The year before, four labourers were irradiated at the Kakrapur Atomic Power Station in Gujarat, and in 2009, plant workers in Karnataka fell ill after radioactive water contaminated their drinking supply.

An auditor-general’s report said India’s Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, is ineffective, mired in bureaucracy, and negligent in monitoring safety.

More than 60 per cent of inspections of operating or under-construction nuclear power plants are either late _ by up to five months _ or never undertaken at all, the report found.

In addition, plans for new reactors and mines are regularly frustrated by bureaucratic delays and fierce public protests.

Emboldened by a global nuclear wariness post-Fukushima, those living nearby to proposed plants are resisting by all means available.

At Kundakalum in Tamil Nadu, rolling protests have slowed construction by years. Violent demonstrations against a proposed mega-plant in Jaitapur (it would be the third largest in the world) have seen hundreds arrested, dozens hurt and one man shot dead by police.

From her seat by the window of her sun-baked hut in Domisiat, Spility sees an irony in her land being sought to power India’s nuclear future, while she has lived eight decades without a light switch.

The matriarch above the mine says she understands her country’s growing demand for power, but that India’s development should not come at the expense of its poorest.

“If India cannot do this without hurting its people, it should not. The power should be for the people.”