Bids reinvited for Tilaiya ultra mega power plant

The government has reinvited bids for the pithead coal-based ultra mega power project (UMPP) at Tilaiya village in Jharkhand.

The two-stage bidding process involves identifying the eligible and interested bidders in the first stage and getting price bids from these short-listed bidders in the second.

Bids have currently been invited for the first stage (Request for Qualification or RFQ) for which the last date of submission has been fixed at November 12, 2007.

Though the short-listing process had been completed earlier, it was scrapped to accommodate tighter eligibility norms necessitated by the experience of another 4,000-Mw ultra mega power project at Sasan, where a qualified bidder (Lanco Infratech) was disqualified after putting in a winning bid.

The ten qualified bidders identified in the earlier rounds will have to apply again, while some new contenders are also expected to join the list.

The bids have been invited by Jharkhand Integrated Power Ltd, a special purpose vehicle floated by the Power Finance Corporation to fast-track these ultra mega power projects.

The government has initiated the process of building 4,000-Mw UMPPs under the public-private-partnership umbrella to plug the country's ever-increasing energy deficit. Two projects of 4,000 Mw each have already been taken up by Tata Power in Mundra in Gujarat and Reliance Power in Sasan, Madhya Pradesh.

Two more projects "" Tilaiya and Krishnapatnam "" are slated to be handed over to the developers before March 2008. Another six ultra mega projects are in the pipeline.