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| The disputed piece of land in Parbatpur on Thursday. Picture by Pankaj Singh |
Oil and Natural Gas Corporation is locked in a land dispute with a private firm that claims it owns a 31-acre area near the ONGC’s Parbatpur project site with the state-owned oil explorer appealing to the Jharkhand government to step in and resolve the issue that was stalling work on its coalbed methane plant.
Jharkhand energy secretary Vimal Kirti Singh, after convening two meetings with the Electro-casting Steel Ltd and ONGC at Ranchi and Bokaro, has asked Bokaro additional collector A. N. Pathak to conduct a probe and submit a report on the ownership of the contentious 31 acres.
As of now, ONGC, ranked the second oil and gas exploration company in the world, is extracting 5,000 cubic metre of coalbed methane (CBM) per day from 22 wells at Parbatpur, 30 km from here.
A form of natural gas extracted from coal beds, CBM is an important source of energy that is also being adopted in the United States, Canada and Australia. ONGC hopes to increase CBM production to 4 lakh cubic metre per day from 42 wells from 2012 with overall investment of Rs 1,500 crore.
ECSL is working on a 3.5 MTPA steel plant at Syaljori and a coal excavation operation at Parbatpur. According to company sources, it bought 31 acre land at Silphore from 24 farmers, but district administration is not convinced as the land in question belonged to the government and could not be sold.
Bokaro DC Sunil Kumar said the Silphore (Chadankyari) land, which ECL claimed to have been bought from private parties , was gair majrua, meaning only the government had the power to transfer it.
“The matter seems tricky and the issue can only be resolved after a total verification is done. ESCL’s claim of proprietorship of the land seems faulty and illogical,” he said.
Kumar added that as per the Centre’s directives, ONGC had the first rights to the land for its CBM project, which is the largest in the country.
Energy secretary Singh convened two meetings with ONGC and ESCL. The first was held in Ranchi on September 27 and the second was in Bokaro where a letter from ONGC’s head of CBM projects, C.K. Prasad, dated October 10 (BKRO/CBM/LAQ/2011), was discussed.
In the letter, Prasad cited discussions he had with Singh in Ranchi on October 10 and enclosed documents pertaining to plots offered by ESCL at Silphore at Chadankyari for verification, besides a few other plots which ESCL apparently wanted to exchange with ONGC at Kendulia.
Deputy general manager of ESCL C.P. Pandey claimed he had documents to prove that the company bought the Silphore land from farmers. But when it was pointed out that the land in question was gair majrua according to the DC, the DGM said since the company had paid for it, the administration should transfer the land to it.