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Unlike the mountainous North, the Southern part of Tripura is made up of smaller mud hills that descend on to the plains bordering Bangladesh.
And, in 2005, when the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, laid the foundation stone for ONGC Tripura Power (OTPC) project, Palatana was a remote village tucked in one of those mud hills, 60 km from the capital, Agartala.
It was the time when Tripura was sitting on huge untapped gas reserves. Agartala was just a little bigger than the Dalhousie square in Kolkata. There was hardly any decent hotel in the city that practically shut at sundown.
Economic boom
Seven years later, at Palatana there came up a huge 737-MW power station — ready to be fired in a couple of weeks — that promises to burn up to 2.6 million standard cubic metre of gas a day (mmscmd) once it is fully commissioned by January 2013. While OTPC is investing Rs 3,500 crore in generation, its transmission joint venture is investing another Rs 1,800 crore in creating an evacuation facility for the power.
ONGC which is now selling hardly 1.8 mmscmd of gas (at a throwaway APM price of $2.5 per million metric British thermal Unit) has uncapped its 70 odd production wells in the State and invested crores in creating the surface facilities to meet the demand from OTPC as well as the upcoming 100 MW capacity of the North Eastern Electric Power (NEEPCO) at Monarchak, right on the Bangladesh border .
Uncapping potential
Gone are the days when ONGC's investments in the State were earning a negative rate of return. Tripura is set to emerge as the company's largest onshore gas asset selling 5 mmscmd in 2013-14.
The huge dose of investment has brought with it palpable changes. Leave alone Agartala — now bigger and better — which is bustling with activity until late in the evening, Udaipur town — a couple of kilometres away from the OTPC project site — now boasts automobile showrooms, hotels, guest houses, a host of banks as well as ATMs.
“What OTPC essentially did was unleash the potential of the State in attracting large investments,” says industry minister Mr Jitendra Chaudhury. His department is now receiving regular queries from both public as well as the private sector on investment possibilities.
“It was far from easy,” says Mr Rajiv Kumar, Executive Director, BHEL, which was awarded the turnkey contract to set up the power station.
Leave aside the equipment transportation puzzle, which was solved with active cooperation from Bangladesh or the scarcity of skilled labour; project contractors was forced to travel as far as Kolkata to get even the smallest repairs done.
In view of the original schedule, the commissioning has been delayed by 3-6 months. But Mr Kumar is unperturbed. He is happy to see the project through. The credit, he says goes to everyone associated, right from the Union Government, Bangladesh, ONGC, the sub-contractors and, last but not the least, the State Government.
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