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The Adani Group has warned Bangladesh’s new interim government that its $500 million-worth backlog in dues from the contentious Godda power project has become “unsustainable”, UK-based daily Financial Times reported.
“We are in constant dialogue with the Bangladesh government and have appraised them of this unsustainable situation where we are meeting not just our supply commitment but also [commitments] to our lenders and suppliers in spite of rising receivables,” Adani Power told the Financial Times.
Despite the mounting dues, Adani Power said it would “continue to supply reliable and competitively priced power from our Godda facility to Bangladesh.”
The new interim government, led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, is facing an immense challenge of reviving the economy of the country after former prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s ouster.
In July last year, industrialist Gautam Adani called on Hasina following the full load commencement of power supply to Bangladesh from the 1600 MW Ultra Super-Critical Thermal Power Plant (USCTPP) at Godda in Jharkhand. USCTPP had begun supplying power to Bangladesh in April 2023, becoming the only power plant in India to export its entire output to the neighbouring country.
The deal was agreed upon during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Dhaka in 2015. Activists have repeatedly criticised the project, arguing that the high cost of importing power from Godda is not economically viable for Bangladesh.
As The Indian Express reported earlier, the APJL’s Godda plant exported at least 7,508 million units (MU) of power — or 63 per cent of the total exports 11,933.83 million units— to Bangladesh in April-March of 2023-24.
On August 12, just a week after Hasina fled Bangladesh, the Ministry of Power amended its rules to allow plants exporting exclusively to neighbouring countries to sell within India.
According to a report in the Financial Times, Bangladesh faced total power liabilities of $3.7 billion as of the middle of last week. In the same report, Yunus’s top energy adviser, Muhammad Fouzul Kabir Khan, stated that the country owes as much as $800 million to Adani.
He said that the interim government has approached lenders, including the World Bank, for billions of dollars in loans to stabilise the country’s finances. “Since joining [the government], we’ve been firefighting,” Khan said.
Yunus took charge of Bangladesh as Chief Adviser of the interim government in August, following weeks of student-led protests that started over reservations in government jobs and forced Hasina to resign and flee the country.
Khan stated that Yunus’s administration plans to reintroduce competitive bidding, empower regulators, and establish an expert committee to re-examine energy deals negotiated under the previous government.
