In which of the following years the Bihar state Hydroelectric power corporation was established ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, 1982. The corporation says so itself. The 'About us' page of the Bihar State Hydroelectric Power Corporation Limited opens: 'The Bihar State Hydroelectric Power Corporation (BHPC) was registered under the Companies Act as an undertaking of the Government of Bihar in 1982.' That is the company's own published account of its own incorporation, which is as close to a settled fact as a question of this kind can get, and it disposes of 1990, 1992 and 1998 together. Two things are worth noticing about the date. First, 1982 places the corporation in undivided Bihar — eighteen years before the Bihar Reorganisation Act carved out Jharkhand on 15 November 2000 and took with it the Damodar valley coalfields and most of the state's thermal and mining base. A body set up to develop the water power of the northern plains therefore survived the bifurcation with its assets intact, while the state's conventional generation did not. Second, the company was not created only for dams. Its stated objects run to 'all types of renewable power projects such as hydro-electric, solar, wind, biomass etc.', including investigation, design, construction, generation, transmission and sale of power — an unusually broad renewable mandate for a 1982 state undertaking, and the reason the same corporation now appears in Bihar's solar planning. What it actually built reflects Bihar's geography rather than its ambitions: thirteen commissioned stations totalling about 54 MW, the largest being Kataiya in Supaul at 19.2 MW and Valmikinagar in West Champaran at 15 MW, with six of the thirteen — Dehri, Dhelabagh, Nasriganj, Jainagra, Shrikhinda and Sebari — clustered in Rohtas district alone. These are small, low-head plants, not reservoir schemes, because a state that is mostly level alluvial plain has to take its hydro power from canal drops.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) A decade late. 1992 is a plausible-looking guess because it sits in the early-liberalisation years when many state power entities were restructured and when independent power producers were first admitted to Indian generation, but the corporation was already ten years old by then and its registration document predates that whole phase.  (c) The nearest wrong option and the one a candidate half-remembering 'the eighties or nineties' is most likely to pick. Nothing in the corporation's record attaches to 1990 — no incorporation, no reconstitution — and the company's own site gives a single year of registration, 1982.  (d) The furthest from the mark. 1998 belongs to the era of the Electricity Regulatory Commissions Act, when states were setting up regulators and preparing to unbundle their electricity boards; a generating company created for the state's hydro potential belongs to the earlier, board-era phase, and by 1998 several of BSHPC's canal stations were already running.

Concept: Bihar's power sector is unusual among Indian states in how little of it is hydro, and the reason is physical. The corporation's own description of the state is the clearest statement of the problem: the northern portion 'consists almost entirely of a level tract traversed by a number of rivers originating from Nepal', and only the southern strip bordering Jharkhand has hilly terrain. Head — the vertical drop water falls through — is what generates hydro power, and a floodplain has almost none. What Bihar has instead is an exceptional density of rivers and of canals built for irrigation, and a canal that steps down a gradient creates artificial falls. So the Bihar State Hydroelectric Power Corporation's portfolio is a portfolio of small canal-based stations: thirteen commissioned plants aggregating roughly 54 MW, of which eight are one megawatt or smaller, plus nine more under construction. For comparison, a single unit at a large thermal station commonly exceeds 500 MW. The corporation matters less for the electricity it makes than as an example of a state matching an institution to a resource base — and, since its objects clause always covered solar, wind and biomass as well, of a hydro company positioned to become a general renewables company.

State PCS 2024 Q103 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q103 — Economy PYQ with Answer