Also, India’s infrastructural growth cannot and should not rely so much on one company and its political goodwill.
In the 1990s, India was beginning to open up to the rest of the world and integrate with international financial markets. Foreign investors were warming up to the India growth story and were looking for opportunities. India desperately needed more electricity to drive its industry and broader economic growth. Both the central and state governments were willing to offer generous terms to independent power producers to set up new fast-track power plants.
One marquee project that was supposed to send a strong signal and open the floodgates to foreign investment in India was the Enron-led gas power generation project in …
Rohit Chandra is an assistant professor at IIT Delhi’s School of Public Policy and also a visiting fellow at the Centre for Policy Research. Primarily a political scientist and economic historian, his academic work spans the areas of energy policy, state capitalism and infrastructure finance; he has spent the last decade studying the coal and power sectors.
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