Damyantee Dhar

The proposed 6000 MegaWatt (MWe) nuclear power plant at Mithivirdi in the Bhavnagar district of Gujarat has now been officially slated for Kovada, Andhra Pradesh. A decade long struggle to save their land has ended in victory for the villagers of the region. The Union environment ministry informed the National Green Tribunal (NGT) of the decision to shift the proposed nuclear power plant ‘on account of delay in land acquisition at Chhaya-Mithivirdi site’. The ministry’s decision was conveyed to the NGT on May 18, 2017, during a hearing on an appeal challenging the grant of coastal regulatory zone (CRZ) clearance by the expert appraisal committee (EAC) to the project in November 2015.

This would have been the first nuclear power plant under Indo-US civil nuclear pact of 2008, where the plant was to be set up by state owned Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL) with technical support from Westinghouse Electric Company.

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