Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd?s inability to set up a power plant at Singur may have put the Left Front government on the backfoot, but experts point out the project was a non-starter for a variety of reasons ? availability of adequate land and coal supplies being the foremost ones.
In fact, though the BHEL team which had visited the site along with WBPDCL chairman Debashish Sen last week, asked for a map of the 997 acres on which the Nano factory of the Tatas was slated to come up, the Union heavy industries ministry, after talking to Bhel, decided to scrap the project even before a map reached them. ?It was a state proposal, for which the Centre observed a formality like visiting the plant site, before politely turning down,? a Bhel official said.
At the meeting with West Bengal chief secretary Ashoke Mohan Chakraborty on Thursday in New Delhi, heavy industry secretary Satyanarayan Dash said the Bhel chairman did not consider Singur fit for setting up a power project. Bhel chief BP Rao also confirmed ?the site at Singur was not fit?. Chakraborty said, ?Bhel and WBPDCL will not put up a power plant at Singur,? but declined to comment whether the government would try to identify some other location.
For a 1,600-mwpower project, land requirement is over 1,600 acre; availability in Singur is 997 acre. Of this, 400 acre is disputed and railway minister Mamata Banerjee is spearheading the agitation to return that to farmers. Coal supplies would have been another critical area as WBPDCL itself struggles to get its requirement of 20 mt a year for its present generation of 3,400 mw as Coal India subsidiaries Eastern Coalfields Ltd (ECL) and Bharat Coking Coal Ltd (BCCL) have allegedly failed to deliver.
If Bhel plans to enter into power generation, sources say it can form a JV with NTPC, with which it already has tie-up for equipment manufacturing and carrying out contracts for engineering procurement and power project construction. Also, setting up a thermal project of this size implies tremendous carbon emission, adversely affecting agriculture, which is Singur?s mainstay.
According to Mukul Roy, a close aide of Mamata Banerjee and also minister of state for shipping, ever since Banerjee had proposed to set up a railway coach factory at Singur, the state government has been desperate to announce a big-ticket project on the same site. The land too is still leased to the Tatas ? the lease comes up for renewal in April next year ? though the group has maintained that it wouldn?t come in the way of future development and is willing to give up the lease if they are compensated.