Faced with a financial crunch and meagre resources, the Uttarakhand government has decided to develop three major hydel projects of its hydropower generation company — UJVN Ltd — through joint ventures for a 42 year lease period.
The total investments in these three projects in Alaknanda Valley of the hilly Chamoli district would be around Rs 4,500-5,000 crore.
A decision to this effect was taken by a meeting of the state Cabinet held here last evening which was presided over by Chief Minister B C Khanduri. This is for the first time that the government has chosen the joint venture route for UJVN, having an installed capacity of 1306 Mw.
The meeting decided that the open tenders would be called for developing three projects — 300 Mw Bawla Nandprayag, 100 Mw Nandprayag Langasu, 250 Mw Tamaklata, with UJVN sharing 26 per cent equity in the joint partnerships with private companies or PSUs.
These companies would also have to give 10 per cent free equity to UJVN to bring down the size of its actual investment to only 16 per cent in the joint venture, Principal Secretary Power Alok Kumar Jain told Business Standard. This means that UJVN will have to shell out only Rs 226 crore in the joint ventures where the investments from other companies would be nearly Rs 4,500 crore, Jain said.
The total lease period for developing these projects would be 42 years, which includes 7 years for development of the project and 35 years for its operation.
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The hallmark of these three projects is that their detailed project reports [DPRs] have already been prepared by UJVN which has recently decided to diversify into all areas of power sector besides its core business of hydropower.
“We don’t have much resources and manpower. In such a scenario, this is the best decision to develop more projects,” said G P Patel, Managing Director of UJVN.