By Our Reporter
SHILLONG: The ‘whistleblower’ Arju Dkhar’s worst fears have come true with the MeECL not being able to generate power from the third unit of the Myntdu Leshka hydel power project.
Dkhar, who is the general secretary of the MeSEB Unions and Associations, Co-ordination Committee, had in the past questioned the viability of the third unit when the original plan was for two units of 42 MW each.
The MeECL engineers of Leshka project site in Jaintia Hills recently said that due to lightning, the third unit had tripped making it impossible to generate power.
After an explanation was sought from Dkhar by the MeECL for speaking against the Leshka project in the past, in a letter addressed to the Director (Corporate Affairs), MeECL, Dkhar said that the third unit was an afterthought on the part of MeECL which brought undue financial stress resulting in the present chaos. The cost incurred so far for the project is more than Rs 1000 crore.
In his reply, Dkhar based his views on the note written by MeECL top functionary Elias Lyngdoh on a souvenir released during the 10th general conference of the then MeSEB Engineers’ Association in the end of 2011.
According to the letter, the investigation of the Leshka project spanned from 1975 to 1996 after which preparation of DPR was carried out from 1997 to 1999. Both the Central Water Commission and the Central Electricity Authority had recommended increasing the installed capacity from the initial 3X18 MW to 2X42 MW. There was no mention of a third unit.
Even when the provisional environmental clearance was allotted in 2001-2002, there was no plan for the third unit.
When administrative approval was accorded in June 2002 and during the visit of the then President of India, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, at the project site, there was no reference to the third unit. Moreover even in 2004, when the final forest clearance was accorded and DPR reviewed, there was no mention of the third unit.
Curiously, it was in 2008 only that there was a proposal to go for the third unit.
“It is an amazing intervention because almost after more than four years of construction and much progress had been made in all the fronts of construction that the third unit was planned,” Dkhar said in his letter.
Moreover, after the tendering process, work order was only issued to the firms and they were in the dark about the third unit and all the works were targeted to complete the two units.
However, with the sudden decision to have the third unit, there was no contingency plan for the construction method for the additional work available with the contractors. It was just after the introduction of the third unit that the worst incidents of flood took place resulting in loss of precious lives. A whopping Rs 139.31 crore, which was an avoidable expenditure, was spent due to the flash floods at the Leshka project site.
According to Dkhar, with the setting up of the third unit, the earlier constructed power house had encroached into the river resulting in flood which should have been avoided if the power house had been re-located.
“The timing for the additional third unit is wrong and the real reason can be known by those people behind the third unit,” Dkhar said in the letter, adding that the Central Electricity Authority or Central Water Commission must have agreed on this out of compulsion.
The MeECL also made a projection related to the power tariff on the completion of the third unit to impress the management. According to the MeECL, the tariff for the use one kilowatt power per hour for the first year will be Rs 2.05 and the ‘levelised tariff will be Rs 1.52 per MW which is more attractive’.
Besides cost and time over run, coupled with the floods affecting the financial health of the MeECL, the huge amount of interest (almost Rs 100 crore annually) for the loan taken for the project also added to the mess.
The Co-ordination of the MeSEB Unions had suggested that a highly qualified technical and financial team of experts on hydro projects should be constituted to ascertain the facts and figures on the actual planning, designing, construction, expenditure and physical verification in all aspects related to the Leshka project so that corrective measures can be taken by the management in future.
However, this suggestion was not taken into account by the Government as it went on defending the project.
There is contradiction within MeECL on the generation of power as while the Public Relations Officer, EB Kharmujai, in a statement issued in November 2011 said that storage capacity of the reservoir of Leshka is more than 6 million cubic meters and ‘it can cater to all the three units for peaking (126 MW) throughout the year’, other MeECL functionaries said that it all depended on the monsoon rains to run all the three units of Leshka.
Kharmujai had also claimed that the third unit of Leshka will contribute to the power generation of MeECL by 113.15 million units in a 90 per cent dependable year (low rainfall year) and added that the third unit will further improve the viability of the project as the cost per megawatt has come down.
However the reality is that despite heavy rains, the MeECL has not been able to run all the three units.