What does Adani give you, Mr. Feku? An untold nexus exposed.

(Disclaimer: This article has been written by Rajeev Kumar in Gulail. Original publication has been linked below.)

It all began in 2006 when the Gujarat Urja Vikas Nigam Limited (GUVNL) invited tenders for the purchase of 2000MW electricity. Three companies – Adani Enterprises Limited, Jindal Power Limited and Power Trading Corporation (PTC) India Limited filed tenders on 26 June 2006. Adani offered a price of Rs 3.7038 per unit, Jindal Rs 3.48 per unit and PTC offered a price of Rs 3.25 per unit. Adani and Jindal had bid to supply 500MW and 150 MW power respectively, while PTC had bid to supply 440 MW (190 MW from Chitarpur Coal and Power Limited and 250 MW from JSW Energy Limited at Ratnagiri). PTC is a power trading company which purchases and sells power.

But the Tender Evaluation Committee of the GUVNL found these rates unreasonably high and hence it re-invited financial bids from the bidders who had already submitted their RFQ (request for qualification) documents. On 9 November 2006 three companies – Adani, Jindal and PTC – filed fresh tenders offering rates of Rs 3.2939, Rs 3.24 and Rs 3.2497 respectively. The Evaluation Committee recommended that Jindal’s bid should be allotted tender because it was offering the lowest price. When PTC and Adani came to know about the Jindal offer, they too offered to supply power at the same rate as Jindal. As a result the corporation sent letters of intent to all the three companies to supply power at the same rate, which was Rs 3.24 per unit.

The day PTC received the letter of intent it wrote back proposing to increase its total power supply from 440 to 630 MW. But strangely the GUVNL rejected its proposal contending that it could not be considered since the letter was received after the letter of intent had been sent. The rejection of PTC’s revised offer was shocking to say the least.

It shows that the Gujarat government had already made up its mind to make a closed-door deal with the Adani group. The state needed at least 2000MW power whereas the total contract capacity of all successful bidders was just 1590MW. In such a scenario the rejection of PTC’s renewed proposal made no commerical or financial sense. On the contrary it exposes a case of favouritism and corruption.  Gujarat was grappling with severe power shortage. To make up for the widening gap in demand and supply, the governmnet was buying merchant power (the business terminology for power that is purchased on temporary basis as distinguished from power purchased under long term agreements) from Adani Enterprises at an exorbitant rate of Rs 5.31 to Rs 5.45 per unit.  Documents available with Gulail show that between October 2006 to August 2007 alone, Gujarat government had paid Rs 322 crores to Adani Enterprises for short-term power at a rate of Rs 5.45 per unit.

On the one hand the Modi government was purchasing expensive short-term power from Adani and on other it resolutely refused to accept additional 190 MW power from PTC which was cheaper by Rs 2.21 per unit. Why?

Wasting Public Money...

The story of crony capitalism doesn’t stop at this. At this stage Adani and Modi governmnet held hush-hush back door mettings and decided to award Adani the contract for 1000 MW at Rs 2.89 per unit. A similar opportunity to lower their bid offers was not offered to PTC and Jindal. Instead they were unilateraly issued termination letters invalidating the earlier issued letters of intent. The ground for termination was cited as lower tariff of Rs 2.89 offered by Adani.

The subsequent judicial process revealed that the contract with Adani was signed on 8.1.2007 while the LOIs of Jindal and PTC were cancelled on 12.1.2006. It is a classic case of politician-corporate nexus under which diefferent rules were set for different companies. It shows that the Modi regime had already made up its mind to award contract only to Adani while shutting its doors to Adani’s competitors.

Even though PTC and Jidnal were willing to supply long term power they were denied the opportunity to renegotiate even as Adani entered into closed door negotiations to lower its offer price after the letter of intent had been sent.

Shantanu from Prayas Energy Group, a Pune based NGO dedicated to democratizing energy governance in India, stressed, “There needs to be transparency in the tender process. There should be no tampering with the documents related to bidding and after the details have been set there should be no changes implemented in the original conditions that were laid out.”

Jindal Power filed a writ petition in the Gujarat High court against this one-sided decision of the GUVNL, following which the HC on 24 January 2007 put a stay on the tender process, which essentially meant that GUVNL could not go ahead with the deal with Adani. In response Adani Power Limited filed a Civil Application asking for the stay to be vacated. On 6 February 2007, the Advocate General, the top law officer of the Gujarat government, appeared for GUVNL and made a written submission before the court that in case the final outcome of the case went in Jindal Power’s favour, the GUVNL would sign the agreement with Jindal on same tems as it had offered Adani. On this, the court vacated the stay.
Within a few hours of the court order, the GUVNL signed the contract with Adani group.

There was a sinister design behind this mad rush to sign the contract with Adani, as subsequent court proceedings revealed.

Four days before signing the Rs 2.89 PPA, on 2.2.2007, the GUVNL entered into another agreement with Adani for supply of 1000MW power at the rate of Rs 2.35 per unit. This fact was hidden from both public and other power producers.

The question is why did the Modi regime sign a contract at Rs 2.89 when only four days earlier it had signed a similar contract with Adani at Rs 2.35 per unit. A difference of even one paisa per unit balloons into an extra burden of hundreds of crores every year. After all it’s the people of Gujarat who are going to foot the bill for expensive electricity. (Subsequently, Adani reneged on the Rs 2.35 contract on various dubious grounds, only honouring the more expensive Rs 2.89 contract)

Coming back to the fight put up by PTC and Jindal against favouristism shown towards Adani, the PTC too filed a separate case in the HC on February 22, 2007 challenging the cancellation of its Letter of Intent. The GUVNL again submitted in the court that in case PTC went on to win the case it too would be accommodated in the bid and allowed to supply 440MW power at the same terms as Adani.
Subsequently, Jindal Power opted out of the race and its application was disposed of.

But PTC continued its fight. Finally, the HC allowed PTC to enter into an agreement with GUVNL to sign a PPA to supply 440MW power for 25 years at the rate of Rs 2.89 per unit, the same as was signed with Adani on 6 February 2007. But the GUVNL was so intent on muscling out PTC and allowing only Adani to reap the benefits that it filed a Special Leave Petition in the SC challenging the directions of the HC. The SC threw out the application.

But still the Modi regime refused to sign the contract with PTC. The GUVNL now rejected PTC’s bid on the pretext that the company had now offered to give all of 440 MW from just one source that is Chitrapur Power Ltd.

(By rajeev.kumar@gulail.com )

Original
http://gulail.com/how-adani-got-contracts-for-supplying-power-despite-being-the-most-expensive/

The Tale of Missing Children in Gujarat

- Gujarat government's Crime Investigation Department (CID), which is the nodal agency in the state for investigating cases pertaining to missing children, has admitted that most kids missing are teenagers, and they end up becoming child workers, with girls taken into sex rackets.

- CID's own track record in tracking down children who went missing is poor. Between 2007 and 2011, it failed to track as many as 4,314 children who went missing in this period couldn’t be tracked.

The success rate of children traced is very poor. During 2012-13, up to March, only 37% of those who have gone missing have been tracked -- 191 of 504.

As of today, 7,240 children are missing, with no tracks found by the government.

- Girls, unfortunately, form the bulk of the missing children. More teenage girls are missing as compared to their male counterparts. While the ratio is almost 1:1 in age group of 0-14 years, it jumps to 3:1 in the higher age group.

- Data of missing children reveal that a few of them are kidnapped and pushed into organ or sex trade. Still others leave home to escape emotional and educational pressures, or to live with a person they are in love with. Most toddlers, meanwhile, are kidnapped for illegal adoption.

- Those between three and ten years of age are made to beg or pushed into organ trade, while those above 11 years are lured into flesh trade and what is called in official circles as "sex tourism.

(excerpt from Gujaratlive.org)

X-Ray of a Fascist! (Amit Sengupta)

(Excerpts from http://www.gujaratlive.org/p/when-they-came-to-barren-border-areas.html)

Social scientist Ashis Nandy had interviewed Narendra Modi in the early 1990s. He came out of the interview shaken. In his own words:

“More than a decade ago, when Narendra Modi was a nobody, a small-time RSS pracharak trying to make it as a small-time BJP functionary, I had the privilege of interviewing him. . . . Modi, it gives me no pleasure to tell the readers, met virtually all the criteria that psychiatrists, psycho-analysts and psychologists had set up after years of empirical work on the authoritarian personality. He had the same mix of puritanical rigidity, narrowing of emotional life, massive use of the ego defence of projection, denial and fear of his own passions combined with fantasies of violence – all set within the matrix of clear paranoid and obsessive personality traits. I still remember the cool, measured tone in which he elaborated a theory of cosmic conspiracy against India that painted every Muslim as a suspected traitor and a potential terrorist. I came out of the interview shaken and told Yagnik that, for the first time, I had met a textbook case of a fascist and a prospective killer, perhaps even a future mass murderer.”


Another social scientist, Shiv Vishwanathan, recently called Narendra Modi an “uncivilized creature” on prime time TV. He said he was sure of this term because he has done “ten years of investigations” on Gujarat. JD(U) leader Shivanand Tewari had earlier said that Modi’s body language reeked of arrogance. He recently remarked (after Modi’s rather perverse and murderous ‘Kutte ka Bachcha’ comment during an interview with Reuters) that Modi should undergo “psycho analysis”.

However, we needn’t rely on these impressions – based, as they are, on body language and psychological profiling – to assess Modi’s character; we could simply look at the record of his conduct.

There are no less than 45 authenticated reports meticulously documenting the Gujarat carnage, which was state-sponsored and masterminded at the highest level. The mass-scale violence was facilitated and executed by the Gujarat police and bureaucracy, including the top brass, and implemented on the ground by blood-thirsty mobs and gang-rapists of the Sangh Parivar, Modi’s ministers and Hindutva leaders. The documentation includes the NHRC report and the bulky volumes of the People’s Tribunal, comprising eminent former judges as members. There are also scores of eye-witness accounts, including those of women – such as Bilquis Bano and Zakia Jafri – who were victims of the state-sponsored violence.

Zakia Jafri’s court petition and the arguments and evidence being presented with it point to a nexus between the Gujarat government and the so-called rioters and to the fact that the violent acts were planned with detailed precision. Several indicators point to Modi himself. The meeting of the top brass in the government one day before the state sponsored killings is a crucial indicator.

Other documents describe in detail the organized carnage and its aftermath in the tragic and inhuman mass refugee camps. People were hacked and burned alive. Swords ripped apart women’s stomachs. There were mass rapes and grotesque public spectacles of gang rapes. Kerosene-filled match boxes were put inside children’s mouths. Ravaged women and children were thrown alive into bonfires. All of this has been documented meticulously and extensively by journalists, activists, lawyers, witnesses, officials, filmmakers, and others.

Is 'Feku' for Hindutva? Read on...

- When Chief Minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi declared that he will renovate the demolished Kedarnath temple during the recent Uttarakhand flood, everyone had a good thought about it.

- But what everyone forgot is that this is the same Modi who ordered razing of more than 80 temples in Gandhinagar, without relocation!

- Everyone thought that he would respect emotions of Hindus but in the name of 'development' these temples were removed.

- Even for Kedarnath, Modi's 'bluff' was exposed by none other that Vishwa Hindu Parishad International secretary Pravin Togadia, who publicly asked Modi that when Kedarnath temple has not faced any destruction, where was the question of renovation?

This is a leader who, all his life propagated 'Hindutva' but could not keep the faith of Hindus! How can he be trusted?

Social Indicators under Narendra Modi: Worst among developed states!

- Gujarat CM Narendra Modi has tried his best to show that under him Gujarat became an ideal state. But the truth is far from this.

- Prominent economists like Dr. Vidyut Joshi and Mr. Pandey have expressed their concerns on the growth of social sector in Gujarat. According to the report, infant mortality in the state is 44 out of 1000 which places it on 11th position among other states.

- Similarly, Gujarat is 12th in terms of annual reduction in poverty. Percentages of children suffering from malnutrition and anaemia is well known!

- In education too, on one hand Modi claims that enrollment in schools has risen by leaps and bounds. On the other hand, sad truth is that more than 7000 schools have been shut down in the state during last 6 years, just because each school had 100 students or less!

- If standard of living is to be considered then consider this: 67% rural households have NO access to toilets and 65% defecate in the open!

The development model of Modi might be of interest to some but official figures and ground reality cannot by neglected at any cost!



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Castles in the Air: Narendra Modi neglecting Gujarat to become the PM!

- This is the height of optimism! Gujarat CM Narendra Modi a.k.a. FEKU, has stated day-dreaming about being the PM of this country!

- In his bid to showcase himself to the whole nation, he has forgotten his primary duty as a public servant.

- Reports are that files have been piling up in the Secretariat, waiting for CM's approval. Feku has been busy in reviewing all the Lok Sabha seats in Gujarat, keeping aside is numerous administrative tasks.

- He does not have time even for bureaucrats! 'Chintan Shibir' that takes place each year has been discontinued now. However, bureaucrats are happy as they don't have to listen to motivational lectures anymore.

- Babus have been kept busy in organizing and discussing his prospects as PM. This has paralyzed the policy making process for various sectors!

With governments in just 4 states, BJP thinks it can run India and with most of the BJP and allied leaders against Narendra Modi, he thinks he can grab the top job. This is paradox at its best!

Is Narendra Modi really concerned about Minorities? Read this.

- Now that he is dreaming of becoming the Prime Minister of India, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, a.k.a. FEKU, is trying all the tricks to show that he is a secular person. But the facts reveal something else...

- It is public that Gujarat government under the leadership of FEKU appealed in both Gujarat High Court and the Supreme Court of India against the Centre-sponsored scholarship for the minority communities in the state.

- It has been revealed that between 2010-12, more than 3,500 students were kept aloof of the important monetary benefit, that resulted into discontinuation of studies by many.

- Not just Muslims, thousands of Sikh farmers who have been dwelling in border regions like Kutch are being bullied for their lands!

- Sikh farmers have been living in this region since early 1960s. But since last few months they are being harassed using government machinery stating that "only Gujarati farmers can buy agricultural land in Gujarat".

- These farmers have toiled hard on this soil and have contributed no less than Gujarati farmers. So why do they deserve such treatment?

Modi's attitude towards a particular community is well known, but it seems he has similar attitude towards all minority sections in Gujarat! Think twice... Can he lead the nation?