NEA denied survey licences for 2 projects

KATHMANDU, APR 17 -

Indicating that the government will no longer give a favourable treatment to state-owned enterprises, the Department of Electricity Development on Tuesday scrapped Nepal Electricity Authority’s application for survey licence for two storage-type hydropower projects.

The department scrapped the NEA’s application for projects, including 600MW Kali Gandaki-2 Hydropower Project and 180MW Andi Khola Hydropower Project.

“This is the first time that the department has scrapped the application of government-owned power entity since it increased the license fee and started scrapping the permits of projects that failed to pay the revised fee,” said Anup Kumar Upadhya, director general at the department.

The firms occupying survey licenses have been losing their permits one after another since the government increased the license fees in October 2012.

Gokarna Raj Panta, spokesperson at DoED, said that the application of Kali Gandaki project was cancelled as the NEA did not pay the revised fee necessary for a survey licence. “Moreover, the application was also cancelled because a project above 500MW falls under the purview of the Investment Board of Nepal,” he clarified.

Under the revised licence fee structure, the NEA is required to pay Rs 6 million to get a survey licence for Kali Gandaki project.

Panta said the NEA also failed to pay the increased survey licence fee for Andi Khola project and the government had also planned to develop the project under the public private partnership (PPP) model under its recent Load-shedding Reduction Action Plan.

As per the revised licence fee, the NEA was supposed to pay Rs 5 million to receive a survey licence for the Andi Khola project.

“The NEA did not respond to our repeated reminders to come up with the increased licence fee,” added Panta.

No matter whether the project planned to be developed by private or government developer, another official at the department said the department will treat them equally and scrap their licence or cancel the application for licence if they fail to pay the required licence fee.

Source: The Kathmandu Post