Even as India hopes to leverage the Indo-Russian nuclear deal, recently signed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Moscow to scale up its nuclear power plans, implementation work on a key nuclear power project is being held up due to delay in supply of major components by the Russian contractor. Despite Indian envoys taking up the matter with their Russian counterparts on several occasions, the power plant remains a non-starter.
The delay has hit the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd?s (NPCIL) 2,000-mw nuclear power project at Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu, despite the public sector firm spending nearly 95% of the envisaged capital expenditure. Russian nuclear reactor supplier Atomstroyexport had won the contract to execute the NPCIL plant in 2002 but after seven years, the plant is yet to be commissioned.
?There has been delay in supply of equipment/components from the Russian Federation. The matter has been taken up with the Russian Federation at the highest level of government on several occasions,? Sriprakash Jaiswal, minister of coal as well as statistics and programme implementation told the Rajya Sabha on Monday.
As of October this year, NPCIL had already spent Rs 12,446 crore against the expenditure of Rs 13,171 crore approved by the government for the project, Jaiswal pointed out. NPCIL’s project is just one of the many projects that are behind schedule.
By June 2009, 474 out of 951 central sector projects (over Rs 20 crore) were delayed. The delays have triggered a cost over run of 13.52% over the original cost of these projects?Rs 3,10,178 crore. In terms of value, the delayed projects constitute more than half of the 951 projects, whose original cost estimate was Rs 6,07,188 crore.