HBNI is a research university and educates students at the doctoral and masters level, and pursues research in accordance with its mandate. It is meritocratic in hiring and promotion of faculty, admission and progression of students and all other policy aspects. As a result, it has a high concentration of talent in its faculty members and students.

Distinctive characteristic of the Institute is to advance indigenous nuclear technological capability. Technology control regime is an established practice in the nuclear field and for India to exploit full potential of nuclear sciences, it is necessary to develop a complete range of nuclear technologies based on indigenous efforts. Nuclear technologies have applications in generation of nuclear power; in health care where it is useful in diagnosis, therapy as well as sterility assurance; in industry for radiography, nuclear gauging and gamma scanning of chemical towers; isotope hydrology; and research. Mathematics is basic to all branches of sciences and serious research in pure and applied mathematics including theoretical computer science is very important for indigenous development of information technologies and for cyber security.

Nuclear engineering is an inter-disciplinary subject and any institution involved in its development has to have expertise in several branches of engineering, physical sciences, chemical sciences, life science, health sciences and mathematics. Scope of the HBNI is very vast. The DAE has pursued a science based approach for nuclear power development and this has resulted in indigenization of nuclear power programme including associated fuel cycle facilities. This approach has also given India confidence to construct reactors based on technology development in the country. This is demonstrated by the ongoing construction of Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor, which is now nearing completion. India’s participation in the international venture ITER has been possible only because of robust basic research in plasma physics and development of related technologies at IPR and other institutions in the country over the past three decades. DAE institutions continue to pursue basic research in areas such as nuclear physics, accelerator physics, laser physics, astrophysics, biophysics, string theory, quantum information and computation, pure and applied mathematics, theoretical computer science, oregano-metallic materials, nano and condensed matter physics, atomic/ molecular clusters, catalysis, generation and storage of hydrogen, molecular mechanisms of biotic stress tolerance, molecular marker techniques for marker assisted selection, development and characterization of transgenic plants, oncology and nuclear medicine, and many other similar areas including several areas which may be classified as blue sky research.  To pursue research, the Institute has a wide range of facilities ranging from table top set up to mega science facilities such as research reactors, accelerators and tokomaks. Computational resources available to faculty and students are quite extensive and faculty is well trained to build own instrumentation and facilities. The Institute seeks to serve the following categories of students.