BackSasan power project remains in limbo, awaits final decision
Sasan power project remains in limbo, awaits final decision
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New Delhi: The board of Sasan Power Ltd that met on 21 March was unable to resolve the controversy surrounding the 4,000MW project in Madhya Pradesh. It will now wait for the comments of the evaluation committee (headed by the HDFC chairman Deepak Parekh), which meets on Friday.
The committee, which was set up to evaluate the bids for all the mega-power projects, will review the bids for the Sasan project that was awarded in December.
“No final decision has been taken. As and when a decision is taken, we will make it public. I do not want to comment more than this," a senior Power Finance Corporation executive involved with the process said.
The Rs18,000 crore power project, to be set up in the Sidhi district of Madhya Pradesh, went to a consortium of Hyderabad-based Lanco and Globeleq Singapore Pte, a subsidiary of Houston-based Globeleq. But the winning team began to undergo changes after the parent of Globeleq decided to undertake restructuring of some of its global assets. That action promptly generated strong reaction from some of the losing bidders, who argued that such a change is actually altering basic conditions on which the project was awarded.
However, Lanco has maintained that the changes do not alter any conditions.
Shyam Wadhera who is the chairman of the board of Sasan Power Ltd (the shell company for the project), as well as the director, projects, of PFC, declined to comment.
V.K. Garg, chairman and managing director of PFC, couldn’t be contacted.
Commenting on the issue, power minister Sushil Kumar Shinde said: “The matter is still with the PFC and we do not want to interfere with it. However, if anything has gone wrong, we will try to rectify it so that the process does not suffer. I am quite confident that a small thing like this will not affect the ultra-mega-power project plans."
The board meeting was attended by Wadhera along with other members of the board, who are the representatives of the states who will be buying power from the project.
The representatives were from Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh.
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