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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 ₹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 first part examined how hundreds of farmers across 12 villages watched their orchards vanish without adequate compensation for either land or trees. The second part turns to a community left out of the process: 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.
Two Adivasi hamlets – Pahariya Tola and Santhali Tola – sit inside the land acquired for Adani Power’s 2,400 MW thermal plant in Bihar’s Pirpainti. But officially, it is as if they don’t exist. Neither of them appear in the project’s documentation, including its environmental impact assessment. Left off the reckoning, 50-60 Adivasi households are forced to fight simply to be recognised as project-affected people entitled to compensation and rehabilitation under the law.
The fight has won them partial concessions—an access road to Santhali Tola and a gate cut into the boundary wall. But the compensation and resettlement package the law promises project-affected communities have been denied to them, allege residents. For them it is also a double blow as many residents worked as farmhands in orchards that have been acquired for the project and do not own land titles. Few of them have documents to prove land ownership but compensation has, allegedly, been denied to them too.
The Terms of Reference for the project’s Environment Impact Assessment, a document issued to Adani Power by the Union environment ministry’s Expert Appraisal Committee, says that nobody requires rehabilitation. Under the category “existence of habitation & involvement of R&R [Rehabilitation and Resettlement], if any” the document says, “No R&R is involved. The land is allotted by Bihar State Power Generation Company Limited (BSPGCL) to set up the power project as per the agreement with the state government.”
That document lists Sirmatpur, Harinkol, Raipura, Mundwa & Tundwa, and Sundarpur villages as adjacent to the project site, and Duldulhiya, Imamnagar, Vasanthpur, Maheshram, Shermari, Olapur, Ramnagar as nearby villages that can be affected by the project. Santhali Tola and Pahariya Tola are not mentioned despite the presence of several tribal families.
