Barmer: It’s been over two decades since the discovery of oil and gas in the dusty expanse of Rajasthan’s Barmer. A decade has also passed since the state signed an MoU with the central government to develop a 9 million metric tonne crude oil refinery.
But the ambitious Barmer Pachpadra Oil Refinery, a pet project of Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, is still a work in progress and a key issue for both the Congress and the BJP as they campaign for the Rajasthan assembly election this year.
While the project has missed multiple deadlines, faced dozens of local controversies, and been a battleground for political sparring in two assembly elections so far, not counting this one, it is still seen as a momentous undertaking that will redefine Rajasthan’s economic profile and identity in the national consciousness.
When ThePrint visited Pachpadra in April, project officials said a battalion of 24,000 workers and engineers were working day and night to meet the latest deadline.
“The new deadline is March 2024. One of the units will definitely be functional. Almost 61 per cent of the work is completed,” Rajeev Jain, spokesperson for the Union Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, said. There are a total of 13 units in the oil refinery spread across 900 acres of land.
The state is hopeful too. “Covid delayed the process. Now the construction is in full swing,” Barmer district magistrate Lok Bandhu said.
While Barmer isn’t quite the “next Dubai or Abu Dhabi” that newspapers had predicted it would be back when Sonia Gandhi, then chairperson of the United Progressive Alliance government, laid the foundation stone in September 2013, there are visible changes on the ground.
Where the region was once a vast stretch of undeveloped arid land, there are now a bunch of sleek hotels and a smattering of restaurants and shops, most catering to the droves of engineers working at refinery sites.
Meanwhile, the political battle to hog credit and assign blame continues, especially with polls around the corner.
Also read: Ambedkar vs Jat king Surajmal, a battle of two statues — why a sleepy Rajasthan town is on the boil
State vs Centre tussle
The greenfield refinery and petrochemical complex in Barmer officially got off the ground on 18 September 2013, when the government of Rajasthan entered a joint venture with the central government-owned Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited (HPCL), with a respective equity stake of 26 per cent and 74 per cent.
This joint venture was incorporated as HPCL Rajasthan Refinery Ltd. (HRRL).
At the time, Gehlot was at the helm of the previous Congress government in Rajasthan and the UPA was in power at the Centre.
In the next few years, the project suffered various delays, largely due to political factors, according to officials speaking off the record.
Finally, in 2017, the Raje government, which had come into power in December 2013, inked a fresh MoU with HPCL of Rs 43,129 crore in April 2017 (with the equity stakes remaining the same) and in January 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for the refinery — yet again.
At the event, Modi took a dig at the Congress: “We cannot mislead people by installing stones,” he said, adding that the project would be completed by 2022. Because of pandemic-related restrictions and other factors, that deadline has been overshot.
Meanwhile, the political jibes have heated up between the Modi government, now in its second term, and the latest Gehlot dispensation, which came to power in 2018.
The latest flashpoint came in February this year, when Union Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas Hardeep Singh Puri visited Barmer to inspect the site.
On 21 February, Puri told reporters at Pachpadra that the estimated project cost had gone up from Rs 43,000 crore in 2018 to Rs 72,000 now. He also claimed that the Rajasthan government had been asked to bear the extra cost, but did not seem to be “ready” to do so.
Consequently, Puri said, the Union government was ready to take on the additional cost, but the state government’s equity would be reduced by 10 per cent — from 26 per cent to 16 per cent.
In an election year, the matter has taken a political turn. Last month, for instance, Gehlot blamed the BJP for the delays and increased cost of the project.
“The refinery work is in progress. It has been delayed for five years by the BJP. We inaugurated the project in 2013 with a target of completion in 2017. But the BJP government did not take interest in the project for the five years of its term,” he alleged.
In reply to a query from ThePrint, the Chief Minister’s Office claimed that the Rajasthan government had paid all its dues for the project.
“The state has already paid the whole demand of its contribution of Rs 2,538.91 crore against equity share of 26 per cent in HRRL till date. No payment of the state’s share is pending,” the CMO’s communique said.
Sources in the state government said that when the Union ministry sent a revised cost proposal to the state, a committee was set up and MECON Limited, a public sector undertaking (PSU), was appointed as a consultant.
“Based on the recommendation report submitted by MECON, the committee recommended the government to consider the proposal. The government considered the proposal and communicated to the centre,” a source in the Rajasthan government said.
When asked about the CMO’s contention that the Rajasthan government had paid its dues, petroleum ministry spokesperson Jain did not deny it. He claimed that minister Puri had held the press conference to ensure that the state pays its dues.
“The minister just wanted to expedite the process. At the ministry level, there is no issue of pending payment from the state’s side,” Jain added.
A decade of delays
The Barmer oil refinery has been a bone of contention between the Congress and BJP in Rajasthan ever since the project was pitched.
Even in 2013, when the Gehlot government signed the MoU with HPCL and accepted the 26:74 agreement, the opposition BJP accused it of not bargaining for a better deal.
In the 2013 assembly elections, the BJP came to power and then CM Vasundhara Raje put the project under review and eventually renegotiated some terms in 2017.
Meanwhile, Gehlot held meetings across Rajasthan accusing Raje of stalling the biggest state project. One of the outcomes was a movement under the aegis of an outfit called Refinery Bachao Sangharsh Samiti, formed to “save the refinery”.
The convenor of this movement, Congress leader Madan Prajapat, organised a 100-km march from Pachpadra to Jodhpur in 2014 — an event that saw the participation of many leaders from the Marwar region.
Prajapat won the assembly election from Pachpadra constituency in 2008 and then again in 2018.
“The movement soon got public support. As we marched towards Jodhpur, thousands of the villagers joined us,” MLA Prajapat told ThePrint. He said that he only lost the 2013 election from Pachpadra because of the Modi wave, before being voted back in 2018.
“This is an emotional issue for the people of Barmer. At least 17 constituencies are affected by it,” he added.
So far, the construction of the Barmer refinery has been a major poll issue in two assembly elections, 2013 and 2018, and this year too the matter is a hot topic.
Barren land to hotels, restaurants
Before the discovery of oil and gas, Pachpadra and its surrounding areas were best known for salt mining, the primary occupation of the region’s OBC Kharwal community (OBCs).
The region used to be desolate and predominantly owned by the government, said Vivek Vyas, the sub-divisional magistrate of nearby Balotra.
“There was nothing. It was all barren. The government owned most of the land. Only a 10 bigha land belonging to a Rajput family which fell in the middle of the 11,000 bigha was acquired. The family was rehabilitated somewhere else,” Vyas said.
Following the government’s allocation of land for the refinery, a wave of applications flooded in from individuals seeking to convert their agricultural land into commercial plots, Vyas said, indicating their hopes that prosperity and modernity would soon come to the region.
Some of these aspirations have materialised.
Pachpadra-Balotra is no longer a backward block in the desert district of Barmer. The town is witnessing rapid expansion, with the establishment of small concrete units and the construction of hotels within a span of just five years. The price of a bigha has gone up. House rents are no longer at throwaway prices.
Throughout the town, “to let” boards can be seen, indicating the growing demand for rental properties.
Savitri, whose son is a labourer at the refinery site, lives on the outskirts of Pachpadra. She expressed her amazement at the amenities now found here.
“I had never seen a restaurant before. But now I have been to restaurants thrice,” she said.
A dark side?
While the development of the refinery has succeeded in preventing unskilled migrants from leaving the district, most of the engineers working in the industry come from outside the district, said SDM Vyas.
“Most of the engineers are from outside. The district supplies around 5,000 workers who are semi-skilled and unskilled. Along with this, there are hundreds of small units which supply concrete material for the construction,” he said.
However, some locals claim that development has brought some disturbing new trends with it, including a spike in crimes and addiction.
Barmer-based Ashok Shera, who runs a popular YouTube channel, told ThePrint that unemployed youth are resorting to activities like snatching and highway robbery. Moreover, conflicts between contractors are a regular occurrence.
“This is routine news for us now,” he said.
Shera also claimed that young women are being “forced” into sex work because of increased demand from “outsiders”.
“We believe that in the name of running spa centres, girls are doing sex work,” Shera claimed.
When asked about a rise in crime in Pachpadra, Barmar superintendent of police (SP) Digant Anand said that the data does suggest an increase in crime.
“There is a rise in crime. If we talk about Pachapdra police station only, then we registered 211 cases in 2018, which increased to 242 in 2019, 312 in 2020, 363 in 2021 and 364 in 2022,” Anand said. However, he said there was no evidence to suggest that there had been any proliferation in illegal sex work.
“We haven’t come across such a trend yet,” he said.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)
Also read: Young women are jumping into wells in Barmer. It’s a suicide epidemic