CAG: Arunachal gave away 4 NHPC projects to pvt firms

Even as the government fights with its back to the wall on coal block allotments, another CAG report has pointed out how Arunachal Pradesh government took away four hydro power projects from the original allottee and gave it to private firms and joint ventures.

Even as the government fights with its back to the wall on coal block allotments, another CAG report has pointed out how Arunachal Pradesh government took away four hydro power projects from the original allottee and gave it to private firms and joint ventures.

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According to the report, six projects were allotted to NHPC in 2000. However, between 2006 and 2010, the state government — in a display of complete non-adherence to rules concerning transparency and competitiveness — allotted four of them to private firms and joint ventures.

“The six projects were first allotted by the GOI to NHPC, but later, out of these projects, the GOAP (Arunachal govt) allotted two of them to private developers based on limited tendering from private parties only, two projects to its joint ventures, and one project to the NHPC,” the CAG said in its report.

“Transparency and competitiveness in allotment of hydro power projects, as envisaged in the hydro policies of the GOI, were thus overlooked,” it added.

Interestingly, all this was done despite instructions from the PMO in August 1999 to form Special Purpose Vehicles for survey, investigation and implementation of the six projects.

The six projects, aimed at generating 20,700 MW of power, are part of an ambitious plan to build a network of 168 dams for generating 63,300 MW of power from the state alone.

The mega-dam network is reportedly being built with brazen disregard for environmental, seismic, socio-economic and cultural factors. This has resulted in protests by indigenous people in upstream Arunachal and downstream Assam. A rallying point is the Lower Subansiri project, which — according to activists — was taken up without adequate feasibility studies.