DVC in the doldrums .
Saturday, 14 July 2012 00:24 Pioneer News Service | Kolkata / New Delhi

0Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC), dream child of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, is in the doldrums. Successive CMDs have run the organisation to the ground through sheer incompetence, faulty planning and failure to correctly judge market realities. At a time when there is a severe power shortfall in the entire country and power companies in the private sector are posting huge profits, DVC recorded a loss of around Rs 300 crore in 2011-’12. It had registered a profit of approximately Rs 1,000 crore in 2006. How did this calamitous fall happen?

The current CMD, Rabindra Nath Sen has ignored repeated warnings on various aspects of DVC’s functioning and seems determined to further lower its fortunes. Since his appointment as Chairman on June 10, 2011, DVC’s production of electricity has steadily come down. The combined actual production of DVC units is down from 69 per cent in June 2011 to 64 per cent, a drop of a significant 5 per cent, in just one year. Sen’s stubborn refusal to accept commercially attractive offers is also causing severe losses to the organisation.

Recently, power-starved Bihar sought to buy 100 MW of electricity from DVC at a reasonable rate of Rs 4.50 per unit. But Sen spurned the offer, terming it “too cheap”. He is believed to have told people that many private power companies were ready to buy power at a much higher rate than Bihar. However, the fact is that no purchaser could be found and DVC is today forced to sell 500 MW of electricity at dirt cheap prices. In reality, DVC has not been able to attract a single new client in the last 10 months.

Meanwhile, the Corporation is flogging its machinery to an extreme point only to justify its faulty decision to award an overhauling contract to a select party. For example, the All-India Power Engineer’s Federation Chairman, engineer Padamjit Singh wrote to Secretary Power, Government of India on June 9 this year: “AIPEF has represented that DVC is persisting in running Bokaro unit 3 with a turbine vibration level of 60 to 70 microns against an alarm level of 35 and trip level of 45. The unit is being forcibly run in unsafe conditions by DVC in a bid to show that the recent Capital Overhaul by EM Services is okay, whereas the fact is that EM has bungled the job and is avoiding attending to the defect of high vibrations.”

Chairman RN Sen has, meanwhile, inducted a whopping 22 “Advisers”, many of them part-time, thereby building a “human shield” to protect himself against searching questions regarding technical and financial bungling. Some of these Advisers continue to serve various private sector companies simultaneously, but DVC picks up their conveyance bills and the tab for other perks. In violation of the Government of India’s directive against Executive Class travel on aircraft, they continue merrily to blow up DVC’s dwindling resources through such extravagance.

It appears that on a whim, DVC authorities decided in 2011 to shift their multi-crore R&D Centre, fitted with costly and sensitive equipment, out of Kolkata and relocate it to Mejia near Durgapur. Despite repeated communication from the equipment manufacturers and organisations holding AMCs (annual maintenance contracts), that they would not be responsible for any damage caused by such shifting, DVC has taken no steps to construct a permanent R&D Centre on the three acres of land allotted to it by the West Bengal Government at Rajarhat in Kolkata. Due to this outrageous decision, DVC has been forced to discontinue R&D activity at its current rented premises because of the disconnection of power supply to the centre on the direction of IIT (Kharagpur), with whose collaboration it was established. The IIT, joint venture partner for this project, is seriously aggrieved by DVC’s unilateral decision which violates the collaboration agreement.

In fact, many such decisions are simply inexplicable especially because they burden DVC with additional costs which the loss-making company can hardly afford. Past chairmen too have been accused of taking flawed decisions, seriously impairing DVC’s financial health. But the current CMD is quite clearly unmoved by the one-prestigious organisation’s pathetic condition. Very soon DVC’s future itself may come under a cloud.