Inside PRAGYA: India’s First Private Tokamak Begins Producing Plasma

India’s emerging private fusion-energy sector has crossed an important threshold with Bengaluru-based Pranos Fusion successfully producing plasma inside PRAGYA, a compact experimental tokamak developed as a testbed for technologies that could eventually lead to a much larger fusion-energy reactor.

Unveiled on September 3, PRAGYA is described by Pranos as India’s first privately developed compact tokamak. Rather than being designed to generate electricity, the machine will allow the startup to repeatedly create, study and control plasma while developing the magnets, diagnostics, software and engineering systems required for future fusion machines.

The achievement is significant because Pranos has now moved beyond computer simulation and component development into operating actual fusion-related hardware. According to Economic Times, the company has successfully created plasma inside PRAGYA, marking the transition of India’s private fusion effort from design into experimental operation.

A tokamak is a toroidal, or doughnut-shaped, machine that uses magnetic fields to confine electrically charged plasma. Fusion power ultimately requires light atomic nuclei to combine under extraordinarily demanding conditions, releasing energy in the process. Creating plasma is therefore an essential step, but it is not the same as producing fusion energy.

PRAGYA does not presently achieve nuclear fusion or net energy gain. It is instead an experimental laboratory in which Pranos can learn how plasma behaves inside a machine of its own design and test the control technologies required to keep that plasma stable.

Technical work published by members of the Pranos team describes PRAGYA as a low-aspect-ratio tokamak with a plasma major radius of around 0.4 metre, a minor radius greater than 0.18 metre, plasma-current capability of up to 25 kiloamperes and a toroidal magnetic field of around 0.1 tesla. The compact vacuum vessel incorporates engineering measures intended to reduce induced electrical currents and maintain the vacuum conditions required for plasma experiments.

PRAGYA was constructed in roughly eight months, but Pranos intends to use it for a much longer experimental programme. The company plans around 10 to 12 plasma shots per day, potentially generating approximately 3,000 experiments every year, and envisages operating the machine for close to two decades.

That large number of experiments is important because developing fusion reactors is as much a control and engineering challenge as a physics problem. Every plasma discharge can provide information about magnetic-field configuration, instability, plasma shape, diagnostics and machine response. Repeated experiments allow simulation models to be compared against real hardware and progressively improved.

PRAGYA forms only one part of a wider technology stack being developed by Pranos. The startup is simultaneously working on JENGA, its tokamak-design and plasma-control software platform, and MAGGA, a programme focused on high-temperature superconducting magnets.

JENGA is intended to bring reactor design and control engineering together from the beginning rather than treating them as separate problems. PRAGYA provides the physical machine against which those models and control techniques can be tested.

MAGGA addresses another crucial requirement for future compact fusion reactors. High-temperature superconducting magnets can generate very strong magnetic fields while offering the possibility of constructing smaller and potentially more efficient tokamaks. Pranos says both PRAGYA and JENGA are being designed so that future HTS magnet modules can be integrated into its development programme.

The company’s ambitions extend far beyond PRAGYA. Its planned next major machine, called PraniQ, is intended to pursue net-gain fusion, with Pranos targeting around 2030 for that milestone. The company also aims to have its high-temperature superconducting magnet technology operational from 2027. These remain development targets rather than demonstrated capabilities.

Reaching net gain would represent an enormous jump from PRAGYA. A fusion machine must create sufficiently hot and dense plasma, confine it for an adequate period and generate enough fusion reactions for the resulting energy to exceed the energy supplied directly to heat the plasma. Moving from that scientific milestone to a practical electricity-generating power plant introduces further challenges involving materials, neutron damage, heat extraction, fuel handling, maintenance and economics.

Pranos therefore has a long engineering journey ahead, but the company is not operating entirely outside India’s established fusion ecosystem. The International Atomic Energy Agency lists Pranos as an Indian private fusion company founded in 2024 and identifies its approach as magnetic-confinement fusion using compact tokamak architectures. The company is also associated with institutions including JNCASR and the Institute for Plasma Research, while India itself has decades of public-sector experience with tokamaks and is a partner in the international ITER fusion programme.

That makes PRAGYA significant for a different reason. India has conducted fusion and plasma research for decades, but the emergence of privately financed companies designing and constructing their own tokamaks introduces another layer to the country’s deep-technology ecosystem.

PRAGYA is therefore best understood not as a miniature power station but as an engineering laboratory for India’s private fusion ambitions. Producing plasma demonstrates that the startup has successfully brought together a functioning vacuum vessel, magnetic-field system, power electronics, controls and other subsystems required to operate a tokamak.

The next challenge is to turn thousands of plasma experiments into better control systems, stronger magnets and progressively more capable machines. If those lessons can eventually be transferred into PraniQ, Pranos hopes to make the much larger leap from creating plasma to demonstrating useful fusion energy.

For now, however, the milestone is already noteworthy: an Indian startup has designed and built its own tokamak and brought it into plasma operation, moving private fusion research in the country from plans and simulations into working experimental hardware.

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