As India faces a coal shortage resulting in one of the worst summer power shortages in decades, a newspaper clipping is being circulated on social media claiming that nine companies including Tata and Adani have come forth with an offer to buy the electricity department.
Facebook users are sharing the clipping with the caption, “कोयला खत्म नही हुआ, किया गया है, बिजली विभाग को बेचने के लिए आप लोग हमारा पेज फॉलो करें और शेयर करें.”
(English Translation: Coal is not finished, it has been done to sell to the electricity department, you guys follow the page and share it)
Here’s the link to the above post.
FACT CHECK
NewsMobile fact-checked the post and found the clipping to be old.
We ran a keyword search and found similar reports that were published in December 2020.
We found a report by HR Breaking News that has a similar headline. According to the report dated December 6, 2020, ‘the Chandigarh Administration released a tender for the sale of 100% stake in the Electricity Department and Nine companies including big companies like Adani-Tata expressed their willingness to buy the power department’.
We also found that the same news was published in Amar Ujala on November 18, 2020. The body of the Amar Ujala article was the same as that of the clipping.
This proves that the viral clip is from 2020.
We also found recent reports from January 2022 stating that the Centre has approved a ₹871 crore bid by Kolkata-based RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group for the Chandigarh electricity department.
However, according to a TOI report dated April 2, 2022, ‘The UT administration will not issue a letter of intent (LoI) to private agency till the matter related to the privatisation of the electricity department is pending before the Punjab and Haryana high court’.
According to the report, ‘UT Powermen Union had filed a petition and had challenged UT’s move to privatise power services. They had argued that the policy under which the services were being privatised in the city had not got a final nod from the government and that it was a draft policy. It was also argued that if all services were to be privatised, it should be in those places, where the service providers had been running in losses, which was not the case in Chandigarh’.
From, the above information, it is clear that an old newspaper clipping about the privatisation of Chandigarh Electricity Department is being shared with a false claim.
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