‘Today I only see denuded land’: Adani’s 30,000 cr power project is swallowing mango orchards

In Bihar’s Bhagalpur district, a 2,400 MW thermal power plant is rising on land whose true costs are only beginning to surface. Awarded to Adani Power Ltd in a Rs 30,000 crore deal, the Pirpainti project has moved forward through disputed compensation, broken promises, and a public hearing farmers say was engineered to silence them. The two-part series traces what has been erased in the process.  The first part examines how hundreds of farmers across 12 villages have watched their orchards vanish without adequate compensation for either land or their orchards. The second turns to a community left out of the process entirely: two Santhal and Pahariya Adivasi hamlets sitting within the project site itself, absent from official lists of affected communities — left with no guaranteed right to compensation or rehabilitation.  Adani Power rejected any suggestion of legal or regulatory violations, saying the Pirpainti project is fully compliant and that it supports local communities and jobs. ***On the morning of February 19, Sushil Kumar walked out of a meeting with government officials believing his land and trees would remain safe for 15 days. The 49-year-old was among a group of farmers in Bihar’s Bhagalpur who had gathered for a high-level meeting, attended by officials of district administration, the police and the state’s Energy Department. They wanted permission from the farmers to cut 100 trees to build a road to a 2400 MW thermal power plant being built by Adani Power.The meeting went on from 11:30 am to 12:45 pm at the end of which a clear agreement was reached: no work would take place on the disputed land for the next 15 days.The farmers, who had to rush for another hearing, for which they were served notices on the same morning, left with some relief. The notices were served under Section 126 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, which permits an executive magistrate to take preventive action to maintain public order. It wanted them to appear before the official and furnish a bond of Rs 1 lakh each.While they were occupied with the hearing, the promise given to them in the morning was broken, allegedly by district administration officials who arrived at the site along with a contractor.“They brought a JCB machine, illegally felled seven mature trees, and stole the timber,” Sushil wrote in a police complaint he filed afterward.Sushil’s land lies in Pirpainti block, on the southern banks of Ganga River and barely 30 kilometres from the 2340 MW Kahalgaon Super Thermal Power Station. His land is now on the site of a second, larger power project – a 2,400 MW ultra-supercritical thermal plant, backed by a Rs 30,000 crore investment, awarded to Adani Power Ltd (APL), on the land allotted by the Bihar State Power Generation Company Limited (BSPGCL).Barely 70 km away, an APL subsidiary also runs a 1600 MW coal-powered plant in Godda district of Jharkhand. It supplies power to Bangladesh.At the centre of the conflict around the Pirpainti plant is the heartburn over inadequate compensation for the farmland acquired by the state, its failure to acknowledge the massive tree loss, a public hearing that excluded dissenting farmers, and an NGT-ordered probe report riddled with errors and omissions. The farmers and residents are also wary of the ecological consequences of having to live in a landscape dotted with coal-based plants.For generations, this stretch of Bhagalpur has grown some of Bihar’s most valuable mango varieties: Jardalu, Malda, Bombaiya, Gulabkhas, produce that farmers here have built their livelihoods on. Mango orchards across the region, including the 12 villages affected by the project, are the region’s ecological lung and economic backbone.Yet, after the acquisition began, the compensation offered, based on two frameworks, became a bone of contention. The sheer number of trees and what the farmers stand to lose in terms of livelihood is sharply disputed by the state. A complaint filed before the National Green Tribunal (NGT) put the number of mango trees threatened by the project alone at five lakh. Government reports, which count trees of all species rather than mango trees specifically, tell a starkly different story: just 19,388 trees counted in the project area, of which 15,691 are cleared for felling and 3,697 for transplantation. The farmers say the mango trees on their farmland have not been included in the compensation. As per the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (LARR), 2013, the trees are to be compensated after adding their value to the market value of the land – a provision farmers say was not adequately invoked in their case. ‘Today, I only see denuded land’ Standing across the road from the high-security iron gates of the rising plant, 80-year-old Keshav Prasad Gosawami looked out over the barren, leveled dirt where a dense tree cover once stood. He shook his head, mourning a loss that no amount of compensation could ever truly replace.“Kewal hara bhara ped hi hamare chat ke upar se dikhta tha. Aaj kewal jameen dikh raha hai,” he said. (Earlier, I could only see lush green trees from my roof; today, I only see denuded land.)Sushil Kumar’s joint family had owned 12.5 acres, including an orchard of 500 mango trees. Separately from the seven trees felled on February 19, Sushil says 100 of his family’s mango trees have been lost so far as construction has proceeded, and he fears the rest of the orchard will follow with, allegedly, inadequate compensation given for nearly six acres.Sushil said his family expected about Rs 4 crore (for the six acres that have been acquired) but received only Rs 1.2 crore.Brijbhusan, one of the 988 farmers whose lands were taken away, said he received Rs 2.75 crore for six acres of his land, but the full compensation remains unpaid. The 65-year-old farmer said he also lost 151 mango trees.After the incident on February 19, 2026, Sushil filed an online FIR, requesting the police to stop the destruction scheduled to resume the next morning at 6 am. But he received no response. On March 4, 2026, Sushil wrote to the Superintendent of Police, Bhagalpur, complaining about the failure of the Pirpainti Police to contact him or act on his complaints regarding the encroachment of his uncompensated land. “The suspicion is that trees are being cut to make a road for Shri Gautam Adani bypassing all laws,” Sushil wrote, attaching documents. Yet, the police, allegedly, refused to intervene.Sushil’s family was already embroiled in a legal battle over the land they held since 1946. Trouble brewed after a 1971 revisional survey erroneously recorded it as government property, prompting an eviction threat in 2007. In March 2018, the Additional District and Sessions Court of Bhagalpur ruled that the State of Bihar could not justify the 1971 entry, declared it illegal and confirmed the family’s absolute title and possession over the land. Recently district authorities cancelled the jamabandi (an official land record detailing the history of ownership, cultivation, and rights) of Sushil’s family. “We are now contesting this in court,” he said.First conceived in 2006 as a hydropower project under the state-run National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC), the Pirpainti project went through two failed proposals over the next two decades – a 2014 MoU with NHPC that lapsed, and a subsequent solar power plant with the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) that also didn’t materialise. Land acquisition began during this period but stalled amid local resistance and disputes over compensation. The project was revived in February 2024 as a thermal power plant and the Adani Power Limited was declared the winning bidder in August 2025. The letter of award granted to Adani Power on August 28, 2025, states that it was being handed over about 1200 acres of land including 1020 acres already held by the BSPGCL and a further 81 acres of railway land and 100 acres of Bihar government land that the BSPGCL would acquire.  This land area, totalling about 1200 acres (486 hectares), was given to Adani Power on a 25-year lease to build, own and operate the plant, at a rental rate of Re 1 per acre per year, according to the letter of award. The Environment Clearance (EC) for the project's first phase was granted by the environment ministry’s Expert Appraisal Committee for thermal plants in April 2026. This document, however, cites a different land area: 479 hectares. Construction had allegedly begun even before this first-phase EC was granted, in gross violation of the rules. On August 29, Adani Power filed an application for a second EC for the project’s second phase, in which the plant will be expanded to 4800 MW with three additional 800 MW units, requiring 55 more hectares (approximately 136 acres) of land. Infrastructure such as the coal-handling and washing facility, the ash pond, and staff housing, built under phase one, will be shared across both phases, which is why the second phase’s land requirement is far smaller than the first. A public hearing or Jan Sunwai was held on January 29, 2026, before construction began, one that farmers say was engineered to keep dissenting voices out (see ‘A managed public hearing’ below). A boundary wall, road, and a helipad have since come up in the fenced project site; the boundary wall was built by the Bhagalpur district administration, and the road by APL. The National Green Tribunal (NGT) later ordered a committee to investigate allegations that construction had begun without clearance (see ‘At the NGT’ below). The EC was granted while that process was still underway.Cut-down mango trees. This photo was taken on April 4, 2026, before the environmental clearance was grantedMature mango trees cut downThe Bihar government has handed over the land for the project to Adani Power at a nominal rent of Re 1 per acre per year.Screenshot of the letter of award from Bihar State Power Generation Company Limited, awarding the project to Adani Power Limited, dated August 28, 2025At the NGTThe issues around the project go beyond individual land titles. Acting on a petition filed by Sharvan Singh, 40, who heads the Kisan Chetna Uthan Samiti – an organisation of farmers whose land was acquired for the project – the NGT’s Eastern Zone Bench in Kolkata passed an order on March 24, 2026 taking up allegations that tree felling and construction had begun at the site without environmental clearance. Finding insufficient evidence at that stage to establish what had actually happened on the ground, the tribunal constituted a Joint Committee – comprising officials of the State Pollution Control Board, the Bhagalpur District Magistrate, and the MoEF&CC – to inspect the site and report back within a month, listing the matter for further hearing on May 14, 2026.Singh’s petition said two other thermal power plants (NTPC’s Kahalgaon plant in Bhagalpur district and Adani Power’s Godda plant in neighbouring Jharkhand) are located in the region. The Kahalgaon plant stands within 30 kilometres of the project, yet no cumulative impact assessment has been done about the impact of building a third coal-fired plant in the same region. It further said “the plant is being built in an area comprising fertile agricultural land, orchards, dense tree cover and forms part of the Ganga basin… and approximately 5-10 lakh fruit-bearing trees including approximately 5 lakh mango trees aged about 25-30 years, supported by long-standing agro-ecological system exist there. This region is seen as a ‘Green Zone’. Destruction of this system will irreversibly destabilise the floodplain, leading to chronic flooding, erosion, groundwater depletion and agricultural collapse in the district.”The Joint Committee missed its deadline. On May 14, the Bihar State Pollution Control Board sought six more weeks to file its report. The bench noted that the original application “prima facie” raised “substantial questions relating to the environment,” and issued notice to the respondents, including the state of Bihar and Adani Power.The report finally came on July 20 but Sharvan Singh said the committee never sought statements or evidence from his organisation or other project-affected persons. At a hearing on July 24, the NGT took the report on record and gave respondents until the next hearing, on September 1, to file their replies.The committee’s report reveals a series of discrepancies, errors, and omissions.Factual errors and ignored concernsThe NGT committee report elides the complainants’ concerns, noting that they couldn’t meet the complainant Sharvan Singh because it didn’t have his contact number.On the core allegation that construction began without proper clearances, the report points to an Environment Clearance dated April 15, 2026, and to letters from the Bhagalpur Forest Department permitting tree felling in October and December 2025. But work on such project sites can legally begin only after the EC is granted. It is silent on the specific allegation that felling and construction began before it came through.The deliberations of the EAC about the project proposal, annexed in the report, contain a factual error. As per the minutes of the meeting held on March 19 and 20, available on the PARIVESH portal, “no court cases and show cause notices related to Environment are pending against the proposed project.” Sharvan Singh’s NGT case was filed on January 6 and registered the same month, with two hearings held on February 5 and 19 before the EAC met on March 19-20. The EAC’s claim of no pending court cases was therefore inaccurate because Singh’s case had already been filed and heard twice by the time it made that statement.Screenshot from the environment clearance granted to the Pirpainti power project showing the claim contained in the MoEFCC’s EAC deliberations about the project proposal that there are no court cases or show cause notices related to the environment pending against the projectThe report also ignores the concerns about the cumulative environmental impact of two thermal power projects - Kahalgaon and Pirpainti - being located in each other’s vicinity, in the Bhagalpur district. The committee’s report claims that the issue has been addressed in the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) study and the Environment Management Plan (EMP) prepared for the project before obtaining environmental clearance. However, the EIA-EMP report makes no mention of a second thermal power project being located nearby and conducts no cumulative impact assessment.A screenshot from the NGT-appointed joint committee’s reportDespite these gaps, errors and omissions, the committee’s report concludes that the relevant permissions have been obtained for work done at the project site and the “averments made in the application [by Sharvan Singh] are not true.”How many trees will