The Ratle Hydroelectric Project, a run of the river hydroelectric power station on Chenab River in village Ratle near Drabshalla in Kishtwar, with 850 MW installed capacity, has been running into rough weather and work on it has been stopped. Whatever reasons for leaving the project half-way, do not necessarily warrant to be enumerated and keep harping on if a positive approach was needed to be adopted with intent only to see the work on it getting resumed. For that, innovative and result oriented decisions need to be taken which unfortunately are nowhere in sight, at the moment.
The project assumes importance not only from the angle of the dire need felt in the State for generating more power and to bridge the gap between the demand and the supply but from this angle also that the cost of this prestigious project has already got escalated by Rs. 2000 crores and it cannot be afforded to be kept in the current position of inertia any more. If the same vacillating and hazy approach of the State Government continues further as regards resumption of work on it, the cost could get escalated further which the State Government can neither justify nor afford to bear.
The bane of the problem is the project having been abandoned by M/s GVK Power in 2014 and no alternate arrangements having been made till date by the Government. It is despite the fact that the appointed arbitrator has given green signal to the State Government for going ahead with the project because of the fact that arbitration is a long drawn process and outcome thereof in the dispute between the Government and the agency M/s GVK Power cannot be foreknown to link it with resumption of the work. So the hazy, rather dawdling approach, willy- nilly , by the State Government towards working out alternate arrangements is likely to boomerang into further overshooting of the cost.
When the Detailed Project Report was being formulated in respect of this project, it was worked out to be around Rs. 5500 crore on the basis of price index of that time and as per recently conducted exercise of working out the cost by the Power Development Corporation, it has convincingly arrived at the figures of Rs.2000 crore of cost escalation as regards prices of the required material since the suspension of work as a result of the abandonment of the project by M/s GVK Power. This amount was, therefore, required to be injected into the project as of now, provided the work was resumed immediately and without any waste of further time.
Agreed that it is not that easy to immediately switch over to an alternate arrangement right at the time when the work on it by the agency concerned is stopped as the project has its limitations in that respect but sitting indefinitely on it without appearing to exert and find out means and ways, also cannot be justified. Does injecting Rs. 2000 crores into the project come in the way of the Government proceeding further as this State is suffering from resources constraints? Well, that cannot be ruled out but hesitant and ambivalent approaches too were no solution to the problem.
We hope that the Government cannot discard the project indefinitely which only leaves it with little choice except finding out different viable options to be explored. It is right time to take a decision and move forward with added efforts. That would result in averting further cost escalation which the State Government cannot afford let alone justify. Let this power project be restarted in the right earnest from where its work was abandoned. Why not, other things remaining the same, it would have started generating power right from the current year.
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