The move by Gujarat Mineral Development Corporation (GMDC) to ship coal from Odisha to meet the requirement of end user power plants in its home state has come a cropper.
GMDC was allocated the Naini coal block in Odisha to meet the requirement of its proposed coal-based power station at Angul. However, the company later made a U-turn and wanted to shift the venue of its power station to Gujarat, causing much heartburn for the Odisha government.
“We have already written to the Coal ministry, urging it to cancel the Naini coal block. The company has no concrete proposal for any end-use plant and is also non-serious about the development of the block,” a highly placed official source told Business Standard.
Ministry of Coal is also understood to be peeved over GMDC's lack of seriousness on the matter. The ministry has given April 30 deadline to the Gujarat PSU as a last ditch measure to obtain the views of the Odisha government and the Union ministry of power on change of site of its power plant.
“The Ministry of Coal has been pursuing the matter with the Union ministry of power as well as the Odisha government for their views on the shifting of the power project (by GMDC) but no response has been received in this regard from them. In this connection, it is requested that the Gujarat government pursue the matter with the Ministry of power and the Odisha government and obtain their views at the earliest. In case no response is received by April 30, the Ministry of Coal would be constrained to acknowledge that the Ministry of power and the Odisha government have not accepted the shifting of the power plant to Gujarat,” Coal secretary A K Perti said in a letter to Gujarat Chief Secretary A K Jain.
GMDC had originally evinced interest in setting up a 1,500 MW power plant in Angul district. But later, it had intensified its efforts to transport coal from the Naini coal block in Odisha to end-use power plants of Adani Enterprise Ltd and Torrent Power Ltd in Gujarat.
Industry observers had, however, objected to the move, stating that the move to transport coal would not be in the interest of the state. They had pointed out that carrying coal out of Odisha to cater to the industrial requirement of Gujarat would deprive the host state of value creation and economic benefits.
On January 10 this year, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik had shot a letter to the ministry, pointing out that some companies who were allocated the coal blocks for captive use of coal in their end-use plants, had entered into back-door arrangement for sale of coal to other parties, violating the very principle of captive consumption.
