What West Seti power project can mean for India-Nepal ties | Explained News,The Indian Express
India’s National Hydro Power Corporation has already begun preliminary engagement of the site in far-western Nepal following Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Lumbini on May 16.
India will be taking over an ambitious hydropower project in Nepal — West Seti — nearly four years after China withdrew from it, ending a six-year engagement between 2012 and 2018.
India’s National Hydro Power Corporation (NHPC) has already begun preliminary engagement of the site in far-western Nepal following Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Lumbini on May 16. in fact, the groundwork and informal discussion seem to have begun much earlier when Nepal Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba visited India in April. During a local bodies election campaign in early May, Deuba had declared that since India was Nepal’s power market and it had a policy of not buying power from China-executed projects, West Seti would be given to India.
Four days prior to the Lumbini visit, the NHPC’s intent in writing had reached the headquarters of the Investment board headed by the Prime Minister. The board is likely to clear it soon and formally ask the NHPC to handle the project.
The CWE Investment Corporation, a subsidiary of China Three Gorges Corporation, had informed the Nepal Government in August 2018 that it would not be able to execute the 750-MW West Seti Hydropower Project it had undertaken on the ground that it was “financially unfeasible and its resettlement and rehabilitation costs were too high”. Prior to that, the Snowy Mountain Engineering Corporation (SMEC) had been refused renewal of its licence following its failure to begin the work “convincingly” during an entire decade from the mid-1990s. The Australian company had been given a generation licence for 30 years under a Build, Own, Operate and Transfer (BOOT) scheme.
India -Nepal power relations…
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