An Adani power project that exports electricity to Bangladesh has faced heat from the new regime in Dhaka over the price of power. While the standoff between the company and Dhaka has made news, a recent protest in Godda, Jharkhand, where the company has built its thermal plant, has largely gone unnoticed. Scroll travelled to Godda to report this two-part series.
On March 30, several workers at Adani Power’s thermal power plant in Godda, Jharkhand, received an email that left them enraged. The email contained a contract that stated that the workers were being hired by a company named Riddhi Corporate Services, for their client Adani Power. Though the contract bore the date on which they received the message, it stated that their “date of joining” was almost two years earlier, May 5, 2023.
Four days later, around 180 employees who had been shifted to the second company decided to protest this move. The workers constructed a small tent next to the main gate of the power plant and sat there on a hunger strike.
The workers were angry because many had given up their land to the company for the construction of the power plant. While they had received compensation for their land, under the terms of the acquisition, they had further entitlements that, they argued, were being denied. Specifically, they had been promised that they could choose between receiving Rs 5.5 lakh or being given a job at the plant.
“We did not get these jobs for free, we had the option of either receiving Rs 5.5 lakh in compensation or getting a job at the plant,” said Mukesh Paswan, one of the landowners, who is from the village of Motia. “We chose the latter, thinking we would get long-term job security.”
Many had given up the money under the assumption that they would be employed by Adani Power directly. Instead, workers told Scroll, they had been hired by another outsourcing firm between two and three years ago and were now being switched to Riddhi through the backdated contract.
Nityanand Jha, one of the affected workers who said he had given up land for the project, explained to Scroll on April 9 that when they first joined the outsourcing company, they were told that the company “and Adani are the same”.
But now, he said, “we have been switched to another company. Tomorrow like cattle they might put us in a third company.” He added, “All we want is to be put under Adani’s payroll and have some job security.”
Gautam Mody, the general secretary of the New Trade Union Initiative, criticised the temporary contracts for the workers. “In my understanding, land is an asset,” he said. “To take that away and replace it with an insecure contract job would amount to a complete violation of the very spirit of the LARR”, referring to the 2013 land acquisition law under which villagers gave up their land for the project.
Mody observed that such temporary contract jobs were being used across the country in the process of land acquisition. “After a certain period of time, these jobs also disappear – they’re precarious jobs,” he said.
This precarity is evident in the experience of Robin Hembrom, a resident of the village of Gangta, who said he had worked at the plant in 2024 in a housekeeping role. “But the contract got over, and the contractor left, now I’m sitting unemployed at home,” he said.
Hembrom noted, “They get people from all over the place to work at the plant, but they don’t give jobs to locals.”
In response to queries emailed by Scroll, an Adani Power spokesperson stated, “Job opportunities and one time settlement has been offered as per Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act 2013 and Jharkhand government’s Rehabilitation & Resettlement Committee’s guidelines and regulations.” He added, “For any open position, first preference is given to locals with matching skills.”
The spokesperson added, “The decision to change the outsourcing partner was formally communicated well in advance and all employees have seamlessly been accommodated in the new company.”
The workers’ protest was broken up by the police on April 6, following which a state minister intervened and brokered an agreement between the workers and the company. On April 24, the protesting workers accepted the jobs they had been offered with Ridhi – after local leaders promised them future employment with Adani Power.
Criticism from the start
Groundwork for the coal-fired thermal power plant began in 2015, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi travelled to Bangladesh and made a pitch for Indian power companies. The same day, the Bangladesh power board announced that it would buy power from the Adani Group.
A power purchase agreement followed two years later, making the Godda project the first power plant in India that would export electricity to another country. The plant, which had a reported total budget of more than $2 billion, would have two units, each with a capacity of 800 megawatts.
From its inception, the project has been criticised by energy and business experts, as well as by human rights activists.
Among the aspects that have been criticised is the move by the Indian government in 2018 to amend rules to grant the power plant the status of a Special Economic Zone, and so exempt it from paying many taxes and duties.
Financial aspects of the project have also been called into question. In 2018, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, based in Ohio in the United States, released a report that analysed the project, describing it as “too expensive, too late, and too risky for Bangladesh”.
The report claimed that the plant’s high tariffs were “clearly designed to benefit Adani” and it was “at least in part” also an endeavour “to prop up Adani Enterprises’ troubled Carmichael coal project in Australia”.
It noted, “It appears that the Godda project will use Australian coal to export power to Bangladesh, locking Bangladesh into an expensive, long-term, and emissions-intensive source of electricity for decades to come.”
In December 2024, the interim government of Bangladesh said it wanted to renegotiate the deal with Adani. It accused Adani Power of withholding tax benefits it had received from the Indian government to set up the power plant. Bangladesh’s top court also set up a high-level committee to review electricity agreements signed by the ousted government, including that with Adani Power.
In its response, Adani’s spokesperson said that the company supplied “reliable, high quality, and amongst the most competitively priced power to Bangladesh in comparison to the other imported coal fired plants like Pyara, Matarbari, and Rampur”.
He added, “Adani has been supplying uninterrupted power to Bangladesh in spite of $900 million worth of outstandings from the nation. We are hopeful of early liquidation for continued plant operations.” He noted that the company had not received any communication about the government’s committee, and that it would “fully cooperate with the government whenever asked to”.
Human rights activists have from the start alleged that the company has violated the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act by forcefully acquiring land from villagers for the project. In 2018, Scroll reported that several villagers were kept out of social impact assessment hearings and that their land was forcibly fenced off by the company.
In its response, the company stated, “Land has been acquired by the Government under the LAAR Act 2013 and R&R policies and transferred to Company.” Further, it said, the company had “honored its commitments in good faith and continues to ensure transparency, fairness, and opportunity for all affected stakeholders”.
The acquisition of land
Land acquisition for the power plant began in 2017. According to the social impact assessment report, prepared in 2016, a total of 841 families were impacted by the construction of the plant – but activists noted that the number was more than 1,000. In its response to Scroll, the company stated that the number of affected people was “determined by the government” and that it had “fully met” its commitments under the relief and rehabilitation policy for the project.
The social impact assessment report stated that 2,120.59 acres of land would be taken over from locals and 264.69 acres from the government. Later, as the updated environmental impact assessment report noted, the total area under the project was reduced to around 558 acres of land.
According to a letter written in July 2017 by the divisional commissioner of Dumka, who has administrative responsibility over Godda district, the total number of families whose land was acquired for the project was 192.
The letter also lists the name of one affected individual in each case, and under a column titled “employment or one-time lump sum”, lists the additional compensation they are due for the land acquired, along with a separate smaller amount as a rehabilitation allowance.
More details on this plan were recorded in a 2017 meeting report of the project’s Rehabilitation and Resettlement Committee, accessed by Scroll – the meeting was chaired by the additional district collector and attended by members of the state’s legislative assembly, and a member of parliament.
The report states that the committee passed a resolution on May 6 that every family that gave up two or more acres of land to the project would be guaranteed one job or Rs 5 lakh, in addition to the financial compensation they had received for their land. Further, it states that families that gave up less than two acres of land would also be considered for jobs.
The provision of employment is in line with the 2013 land acquisition law, which states that the “appropriate government” shall “where jobs are created through the project, after providing suitable training and skill development in the required field, make provision for employment at a rate not lower than the minimum wages provided for in any other law for the time being in force, to at least one member per affected family in the project or arrange for a job in such other project as may be required”.
Further, Saraj Mishra, one of the leaders of the protestors group, claimed that though the company did appear to provide jobs to those whose land was acquired, the process was haphazard and unfair. For instance, he noted, many landowners were circulated from one training programme to another for years and were finally given a job in an unrelated field.
“We were first told that you all don’t have any skills, so you’ll need to be trained,” he said. “After two years, we were told that the training was of no use and then we were sent to the ITI [Industrial Training Institute] for two years, after that an internship for a year.”
One affected landowner shared documents with Scroll that showed that he had been trained as a fitter for a year, then as a welder, and finally as an automotive technician for two years – but his employment contract dated 2023 showed that he had been hired as an operator.
“How does this make sense?” he said, asking not to be named. “Their entire plan was to keep us busy from one thing to another so we couldn’t organise and protest.”
In its response, the company said, “As per their education, interest and skills, local project affected people were provided training and accordingly job has been offered.”
Apart from assuring employment for those whose land was used for the project, the environmental impact assessment report also contains clauses more broadly pertaining to the employment of locals. It states, “As part of CSR prior identification of local employable youth and eventual employment in the project after imparting relevant training shall be also undertaken. Company shall provide separate budget for community development activities and income generating programmes.”
But residents of the three villages said that apart from a few tailoring programmes for women, the company had not provided any other support of this nature.
In its response, the company claimed that more than 2,0000 women had been “trained in Stitching/Tailoring from more than 20 villages of around Power Plant”.
How the protest ended
On April 6, at 2 pm, local police broke up the protest, and forcibly transported several of the workers to the Godda city police station where, according to local reports, they were made to undergo medical checkups – protestors said police claimed that this was for their own health and safety.
But on returning to the protest site, they found that the tent had been broken down. The workers then shifted their protest a few kilometres further away from the plant, seeking shelter from the scorching heat under a banyan tree.
“It was very hot without the tent and people were already fasting,” said Paswan. “Five people fainted and had to be rushed to the hospital.”
The local administration did not respond to queries emailed by Scroll about the protests being forcibly broken up, and adverse health consequences that protestors faced.
On the evening of April 10, Sanjay Yadav, the member of the legislative assembly of the Godda constituency and Jharkhand’s minister for labour and employment, arrived at the protest site. After speaking with the workers, he offered them juice boxes to break their hunger strike.
“The workers will be granted their genuine demands according to existing rules and laws,” he told Scroll. He added that negotiations would continue after more high-level meetings with Adani officials and the local administration.
After the protesting workers accepted the jobs with Riddhi on April 24, one of them, Ragnee Jha, told Scroll that local leaders had assured them that they would be provided permanent jobs directly under Adani Power. But she added that they told the workers, “It will take some time.”
This is the first of a two-part series.
