After inspecting the Atthipattu thermal power plant in Tiruvallur district, Tamil Nadu Electricity Minister V Senthil Balaji has alleged that 2.38 lakh tonnes of coal worth Rs 85 crore has gone missing from the accounts due to the mismanagement of the previous AIADMK government. The minister further said a detailed departmental probe will be initiated and action will be take against those found involved in the alleged discrepancy between records and the stock on hand.
Atthipattu thermal power station is located in Tiruvallur district, close to Chennai that produces 630 megawatts power and primarily supplies power to the norther parts of Tamil Nadu’s capital city.
“Coal which we use should have a calorific value of 6,000/ton in standard to produce particular amount of power. But the imported coal doesn’t give much of yield. So we combine both local and imported coal and yet it doesn’t match the actual output of domestic coal. So more coal is spent to compensate and that doesn’t get accounted. This deficit coal is reported as missing,” said Vijayan, ex-EB employee and CITU state secretary.
“Such low quality coal were imported during AIADMK government for higher costs which were out with proofs. This irregularities happened in the higher government level,” he claimed.
The central audit general report in 2018 found that Tamil Nadu’s power utility imported poor quality coal during 2012-16, resulting in excess payment of Rs 813.68 crore, the minister said.
“The audit also found that the Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation (Tangedco) released Rs 5,767.13 crore to supplier of 60 per cent of the coal consignments without obtaining a mandatory Certificate of Country of Origin (COO), a violation of its own tender conditions. Arapoor Iyakkam, an anti-corruption NGO had taken up this issue in 2018 and filed two complaints on the same.”
“The government has lost around 6,000 crores from the period of 2012-16 and 20 dollars was paid extra for each ton of coal. Not only in this plant, probe should be conducted in all other plants in Tamil Nadu,” said Jayaram Venkatesh, coordinator of Arapoor Iyakkam.
“I was the one who reported this earlier and formed a committee to find the irregularities in coal import. The new minister is trying to get brown points from his Chief Minister by doing what I already did,” said former power minister P Thangamani to the allegation made by Balaji.
However, the CAG report revealed that irregularities happened in import of coal between 2012-2016 which is yet to be probed by the agencies, which created a huge loss to the exchequer. It is to be noted that the electricity board, at present, is submerged with the debt of Rs 1.50 lakh crores, which is enormous.
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