Nitish: Passing the buck

Patna, March 28: Chief minister Nitish Kumar today passed the power buck to the Centre even as electricity authorities said residents would have to sweat it out for a few more days.

Nitish blamed the Centre for stalling all power projects in Bihar. “Every time I ask for coal linkage, Union minister Sriprakash Jaiswal talks about coal blocks given to Bihar. It’s like giving a piece of land to a man who is asking for food. It will take 10 years for coal to be dug out from them,” the chief minister said in the Assembly.

He expressed frustration over the delay in completion of the Barh Super Thermal plant. “When I got it inaugurated in 1999, the first unit was supposed to start production in 2007. But that has not happened,” he said.

Nitish took a dig at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s statement that the Centre was thinking of committing 50 per cent of the production of a thermal plant to the state it was located in.

“This is for new power plants. Barh was sanctioned long ago when power committed to the state where the thermal plant was built was only 10 per cent of its production. The then state government did not negotiate for more power with National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC). We will have to wait for another new thermal plant to get 50 per cent of its produced energy,” Nitish said.

The chief minister said the power protests were natural. “But if burning my effigy can bring power, I am ready to provide straw for making the effigies. It is a yearly ritual; every time water is released from Farakka to Bangladesh, power production gets hit. If there is deficient rain, the crisis is going to linger on,” he said.

The state received around 900MW of electricity on Monday against the scheduled allocation of 1,722MW from the central sector. The power situation has turned grim with generation stopping at NTPC plants at Talchar, Kahalgaon and Farakka.

Bihar State Electricity Board chairman P.K. Rai said: “We have been getting around 800-850MW of power from the central sector which is less than half of our scheduled allocation of 1,722MW.”

The situation is unlikely to improve in a day or two as an NTPC official said it would take time to restore generation at unit 1 of the Talcher plant which supplies around 180MW to the state.