Which hydropower plant in Bhutan was inaugurated recently by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, the Mangdechhu Power Plant. The Mangdechhu Hydroelectric Project stands on the Mangdechhu river in Trongsa dzongkhag in central Bhutan and has an installed capacity of 720 MW, the figure carried by Druk Green Power Corporation, the Bhutanese state utility that owns and runs the country's hydropower stations. It was built with Government of India assistance structured as 40 per cent grant and 60 per cent loan, was conceived and designed by NHPC Ltd, and took its main equipment from BHEL. It was commissioned in 2019 and jointly inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bhutan's Prime Minister Lotay Tshering during Modi's visit to Bhutan in August 2019 — a date widely reported as 17 August 2019, although we have not confirmed the day from an official press release. 'Recently' in a December 2019 paper points squarely at that visit, which is what makes (d) the only option in the right time-frame.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Chhukha is the oldest of the big India-assisted Bhutanese projects — 336 MW on the Wangchhu in Chhukha dzongkhag, with its units commissioned in the late 1980s. It is the plant that began the whole India-Bhutan hydropower relationship, which is why it is the most familiar name on the list, but it was inaugurated more than three decades before the event the question refers to.  (b) Dagachhu is a 126 MW station in Dagana dzongkhag, commissioned in 2015 and notable as Bhutan's first hydropower project developed on a commercial, public-private basis rather than as a wholly inter-governmental one. Both its size and its date are wrong for this question.  (c) Kurichhu (the paper prints 'Kurichha') is a 60 MW plant in Mongar dzongkhag in eastern Bhutan, commissioned in 2001-02 — the smallest of the four and nearly two decades too early. Its name is a good trap because, like Mangdechhu, it ends in '-chhu' and sounds equally unfamiliar.

Concept: Hydropower is the core of the India-Bhutan economic relationship. Bhutan's rivers fall steeply from the Himalaya and are fed by snowmelt and the monsoon, which suits run-of-the-river schemes that need little reservoir storage; India finances and builds the projects on a mix of grant and loan, Indian public-sector undertakings such as NHPC design them and BHEL supplies equipment, and the surplus power is exported to India under long-term arrangements. For Bhutan the projects are a mainstay of public revenue and its largest export; for India they add clean power and anchor the closest of its neighbourhood relationships. A useful piece of vocabulary: 'chhu' means water or river in Dzongkha, so Wangchhu, Kurichhu, Dagachhu, Mangdechhu and Punatsangchhu are all rivers, and each project is simply named after the river it sits on. A 'dzongkhag' is a district.

State PCS 2019 Q80 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q80 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer