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Homi Sethna: The Engineer Who Guided India to Smiling Buddha

India’s 1974 nuclear test needed more than physics. It needed an engineer who could actually build the plant. That engineer was Homi Sethna.

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Homi Sethna was born on 24 August 1923, in Bombay.
He studied chemical engineering at Bombay’s University Department of Chemical Technology, then did graduate study at the University of Michigan.
In 1959, as Project Engineer, he led the plutonium plant at Trombay. It was the first such plant designed and built entirely by Indian engineers.
In 1972, he became Chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission, succeeding Vikram Sarabhai.
As AEC Chairman, he was the guiding administrative figure behind India’s first nuclear test, Smiling Buddha, on 18 May 1974, at Pokhran.
He served as AEC Chairman until 1983, when Raja Ramanna succeeded him.

Before Trombay, he had already set up a thorium-extraction plant at Alwaye, Kerala, separating rare earths from monazite sand.
He also managed the Canada-India 40 MW reactor project, and oversaw a uranium mill built at Jaduguda, Jharkhand.
Over his career, he received all three top Padma honours: the Padma Shri in 1959, the Padma Bhushan in 1966, and the Padma Vibhushan in 1975.
In 1960, he also won the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize.
Later in life, in 1991, he served as Sheriff of Bombay.
He died on 5 September 2010, in Mumbai.

Sethna, as AEC Chairman, gave the 1974 test its institutional and administrative leadership. Raja Ramanna led the direct scientific team at BARC that actually built the device. These were two different, complementary roles behind the same test, not the same job.
India officially termed its 1974 test a “peaceful nuclear explosion,” not a weapons test. This framing was a deliberate choice at the time, not just a later label.
Sethna’s career shows a genuine engineer’s path to the top of India’s nuclear programme. He did not start as a physicist. He built real plants, by hand, long before he ever chaired anything.
One physicist on Ramanna’s own 1974 design team later held Sethna’s old chair himself. See SciTech0102 — Rajagopala Chidambaram, AEC Chairman from 1993 to 2000.