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.
The chimneys of Adani Power’s thermal plant in Godda loom large over Gangta, a village of around 50 families, most of whom are Adivasi farmers.
In recent years, their attempts to grow more crops has led to steady groundwater depletion – a common problem in rural India. “Earlier we used to dip buckets into the well to take out water, but in the last five years the water started drying up and now we have to dig borewells to get water,” said Robin Hembrom, a resident.
Besides, as he pointed out, in order to access water from borewells, they need to run motor pumps that pull water to the surface, but electrical supply in the village is irregular – despite its proximity to the Adani-owned power plant.
“Often, only two houses receive proper electricity, the rest get such little voltage that even bulbs don’t light up properly,” said Hembrom. “It gets difficult to run the motor for the borewell.”
He added, “If the Adani power company is right next door generating electricity, shouldn’t we get regular electrical supply at least?”
The residents of nearby Motia village echoed Hembrom. Devrat Jha said company representatives had assured them that “free electricity would be provided” within a 5-km radius of the project. But two years after the project became operational, the village continues to face power cuts.
“Electricity comes for an hour, goes for two hours, comes for half an hour, goes for an hour,” Jha said.
In response to questions sent by Scroll, a spokesperson of Adani Power said: “We are only a power generating company and as per regulations, we cannot undertake power distribution.”
Accurate as it may be, the company’s response is unlikely to satisfy many people who live in the vicinity of the thermal plant. Several of them told Scroll that they gave up fertile farmland for the plant in the hope that a project associated with India’s richest industrialist would transform their lives.
“It felt like a golden dream,” said Omkar, a resident of Motia village. “Such a big man, Gautam Adani, was setting up a power plant in our village. We thought we would get jobs, facilities, prosperity.”
Omkar and other residents told Scroll that while trying to persuade them to part with their land, company representatives made several promises at village meetings. “We were promised round-the-clock electricity, a good hospital, the best health centre, schools for education,” he said. “It was a lot of big talk.”
An unusual project
Commissioned in 2023, with a capacity to generate 1,600 megawatts of power, Adani Power’s thermal plant in Godda is the only private sector project in India which has been allowed to export power to another country. It is also the only standalone power project to be granted the status of a Special Economic Zone, which translates into a range of subsidies.
In addition, the Jharkhand government helped acquire land for the project by classifying it as “public purpose”, a move that was criticised by many experts. “With the Godda plant being set up only to evacuate electricity to Bangladesh, it is critical to justify how this is public purpose for India,” Kanchi Kohli, legal research director at the Centre for Policy Research-Namati Environmental Justice Program, had told Scroll in 2018.
According to an SEZ notification issued in September 2019, about 226 hectares of land were acquired for the project from five villages. The largest contribution came from two villages – about 77 hectares from Motia, and 71 hectares from Gangta.
“When we learnt that the plant was to come here, we had high hopes,” said Devrat Jha, the Motia resident. “We supported the company right from the start. About 300-400 of us men would go support the company in public meetings.”
But their expectations remain unfulfilled, he said. “Use and throw is what happened to us,” Jha said. We have not benefitted from the company’s arrival, instead we have been harmed.”
Disappointment with the project came to fore in April when more than 170 residents went on a hunger strike – among them were around 50 who had given up their land for the project on the assurance that they would get jobs with the company.
As reported in the first part of this series, they were unhappy at being given contractual jobs with an outsourcing company, rather than regular jobs at Adani Power.
While the protest ended a few days later after Jharkhand’s labour minister assured the workers that their “genuine demands” would be met, it ended up putting a brief spotlight on local grievances against the project.
“Promises made for basic amenities like health, water supply, electricity and education have still not been fulfilled,” said Mukesh Paswan, a landowning protestor from Motia village.
Locals recounted that many of these promises were made verbally. Arpitha Kodiveri, environmental lawyer and assistant professor at Vassar College, described this tactic as “strategic ambiguity”.
When companies are acquiring land, she said, they “often throw in the bargaining chip of jobs, hospitals and basic amenities” but these promises are “very often oral and never really written down”. Further, she added, “these promises are never broken down to specificities like where will the hospital be built or what would the school look like”.
Indeed, in official documents, the company’s commitments lack specificity. The environmental impact assessment for the project, prepared in July 2018, noted that a corporate social responsibility budget of Rs 55.62 crore had been earmarked for education, sanitation, health, livelihood and rural development.
The latest environmental clearance compliance report prepared by the company in September 2024 claimed that it had undertaken “various community development activities in Education, Community Health, Sustainable Livelihood, Rural Infrastructure Development and Climate Action verticals”, benefiting “5 lakhs people directly and 13.77 lakhs people indirectly”.
In response to queries emailed by Scroll, an Adani spokesperson stated, “the CSR Department of Adani Power Godda has actively worked in line with the commitments, focusing on holistic community development”.
The spokesperson shared letters of endorsement from the local community in which they expressed their gratitude for development work done by the company.
Health and education
In conversations with Scroll, however, residents expressed disappointment with the company. They said that they had hoped that with the construction of the power plant, they would be able to see an improvement in health and education services available to them.
A 2017 meeting report of the project’s rehabilitation and resettlement committee noted that the committee “unanimously passed a resolution that, the treatment of people from the affected area in the hospital should be done at minimum cost” – though it does not specifically lay down a commitment to build a hospital or health facility.
In its response to Scroll, the company stated, “We provide regular health camps, mobile medical units, vaccination drives (including COVID-19), specialized health camps, renovation and upgradation of primary healthcare centres and maternal-child health services.” It did not respond to other specific queries about the state of health facilities in villages affected by the project.
In Motia village, residents complained that the company had merely inscribed its logo on the existing local government-run primary health centre, which, they alleged, remained as poorly stocked and understaffed as ever.
“They hardly have medicines, they only give paracetamol for all illnesses,” claimed Balmukund Mandal, one resident. “If someone falls seriously ill they have to be taken to the Godda hospital.”
Scroll visited the clinic to verify these claims – government workers there declined to show us stocked medical provisions, and only stated that they had what was needed for a village clinic.
Jagatnarayan Jha, Motia’s pradhan, said that doctors did not visit the clinic regularly. “The doctors are not regular, they come on some days and skip others,” he said. “Since the past month they have stopped coming here completely.”
The compliance report states that the Adani foundation organised 54 specialised health camps at Motia between April and September 2024 and treated a total of 861 patients.
However, Ashok Choudhary, the mukhiya of Motia, alleged, “Their health camps are not stocked properly and the medicines are subpar.”
The compliance report also states that the foundation provided nutritional support to 353 tuberculosis patients in Godda district. Choudhary said he had not heard of these efforts.
When it came to education, according to the 2017 meeting report’s resolution, “25% of the enrollment in the school opened by the company should be reserved for the children of the affected area and their tuition fee should be kept minimum”.
The only school referred to in the 2024 compliance report that was to be set up by the company was a “state of the art school” to be opened in Ranitikar village by April 2025. Scroll phoned the district superintendent of education to ask if the school had been completed, and if the reservation was being implemented.
Though the official said he would respond with the information, he had not done so by the time of publication, despite repeated reminders.
In its response to Scroll, the company spokesperson said, “A modern school with the latest teaching equipment and facilities is under construction at Ranitikar and is targeted to be opened for the next academic year (2026).”
Godda’s education department told Scroll that Adani Foundation had improved school infrastructure in many areas within the district. “They have built smart classrooms, provided furniture and dining sets in hostels,” said Deepak Kumar, the district superintendent of education.
Further, the spokesperson stated to Scroll that the company had provided support “to local schools, via classroom renovation, scholarships, digital classrooms, and bridge courses. Our CSR activities cover 338 Govt Schools under Gyanoday digital learning program benefitting 90,000+ students of Godda.”
But residents in all three villages said they were dissatisfied with schools in the area.
In the local primary and secondary school in Patwa village, in one part of the school, walls were freshly painted, and adorned with the logo of the Adani Foundation. In another part, however, two classrooms lay in disrepair.
The school has around 80 students, enrolled between classes one and eight. “We have only two teachers, so we have to combine the students belonging to classes one to four in one class, and classes five to eight in another class,” said a school representative who did not want to disclose his name because he was not authorised to speak to the media.
He added: “The Adani company is installing solar power equipment in the school and they’ve also provided us TVs with pre-installed lessons. But they had also promised us laptops which they didn’t give us.”
The environmental impact assessment report of the project said that “computer facilities may be provided in the school along with a trained computer teacher to inculcate computer skill among youth”, though it does not specify which school this is referring to.
The compliance report notes that the Adani Foundation started the Gyan Jyoti Tuition Program in 2018-’19 in Motia village, which coaches 30 children every year and helps them prepare for exams through “concept building and remedial classes”. Ashok Choudhary, the mukhiya of Motia, confirmed that the programme had been running for the past six years in the village.
However, he was sceptical of a similar coaching programme for Class 6 students to prepare for the entrance exam for Jawahar Navodya Vidyalaya schools, saying it was a “programme being run just in name”.
Choudhary also complained that the new building that Adani Foundation had constructed for an existing school in Motia, partly using government funds for local development, did not have regular teachers. “The students just enroll at the school, but they study with tuition,” he said. “Can you not use CSR funds and hire teachers?”
Among the letters of endorsement sent by the Adani spokesperson is one signed by Choudhary. Dated January 2025, it expresses appreciation for the company’s initiatives in the spheres of health and education. Choudhary told Scroll that the letter was indeed his, but he disputed the date. He said he had written the letter in 2023 prompted by company officials who “said that some of their work was stuck and so if I wrote such a letter they would get more funds” from the budget allocated for corporate social responsibility projects.
The letter also mentions appreciation for the company's efforts to distribute blankets among the community, as well as saplings to farmers. Choudhary told Scroll that the saplings lacked proper roots. “They might have survived for some ten days but they died later,” he said.
Water and environment
Motia, around 2 km from the power plant, has a cluster of temples, some built just a few feet away from each other. Almost all of them have signboards embedded into their outer walls, which bear the Adani name.
But while temples abound in Motia, piped water has not reached all houses. Many households still rely on wells and handpumps for water.
Mithun Bharati and Neeraj Das, two youths from Motia walked us to the outskirts of the village to show us the condition of the wells. The main well appeared grimy, and there was moss growing in the water inside.
“Look, it’s not even covered and all sorts of dust and ash keeps falling into the well,” said Bharati. Das added, “Earlier the water was better, but now we have to filter it first before using.”
They explained that some villagers used a pond closer to the plant to bathe and wash clothes. “In the last two years, the water there has turned so dirty that we get boils if we bathe in it, so we have stopped using it,” said Das.
Jagatnarayan Jha, the pradhan, said, “At least they should provide water. How are people supposed to survive in this heat without water?”
In its responses, the company stated, “The Godda unit is a zero-discharge plant, and hence there is no possibility of it affecting any water body outside its boundaries.”
It also claimed that the company had used corporate social responsibility funds to undertake “multiple water conservation and recharge initiatives”, which include the deepening and cleaning of 85 village ponds and the installation and repair of hand pumps.
Apart from struggling with a lack of water, locals also said they had observed a rise in pollution in the past five years.
Naresh Prasad Saha from Patwa village noted, “The pollution has increased so much that our crops turn black as they are covered with grime. This requires more water to wash off.”
In Motia, too, villagers complained about the rise in pollution. “There is so much dust on our roads,” said Devrat Jha, the resident of the village. “Our elders who used to take morning walks on the roads have stopped doing so.”
Jagatnarayan Jha, the pradhan, contended, “If you walk around in the streets for two hours, the insides of your nostrils will turn black.”
In its responses, the company noted that the plant “operates on ultra-supercritical technology, which is among the most environmentally efficient and cleanest coal-based power generation technologies available today”.
The company also said that it has undertaken “comprehensive pollution control measures” such as the deployment of “vacuum-based road sweeping machines and water tanker-based sprinkling systems” and the development of a “dense green belt”.
‘Genuine complaints’
On April 10, the workers broke their fast on the persuasion of Jharkhand’s labour minister Sanjay Yadav, who is also the elected legislator from the area. Standing next to him, the mukhiya of Motia panchayat Ashok Choudhary told Scroll that Adani Power “had not provided any facilities under their CSR programme”.
Yadav, the minister, concurred. “These complaints are genuine,” he said. “These issues will be addressed in two to four days.”
However, a fortnight later residents of Motia said that the situation remained the same. “There was talk of a meeting between the company, the community and the administration,” said Devrat Jha. “But nothing has happened so far.”
