Eighteen years and counting — Punatsangchhu-I versus the rest

Punatsangchhu-I (PHPA-I) broke ground in 2008. Eighteen years on, the 1,200 MW station is still not commissioned. The geological setbacks at the dam site — the toe-slide of 2013, the subsequent re-engineering, the slow tunnel-stability work — have stretched the build into a third decade.

The comparators tell the scale of the outlier. China’s 22,500 MW Three Gorges — twenty times PHPA-I’s nameplate — went from groundbreak to full commercial operation in 17 years. China’s 16,000 MW Baihetan was done in 9. Norway’s Sira-Kvina, similar in scale to PHPA-I, took 4 years to commission in the early 1970s.

The cost of the delay is not just the missing electricity. It is the implicit cost of capital on the Indian-rupee bilateral debt that finances the build, the foregone export revenue at the PPA tariffs negotiated against an early-commissioning assumption, and the institutional attention absorbed by one project that the country’s broader infrastructure programme could have used.