Spotlight on a seven-year-old letter to denounce PPA

A letter written by senior bureaucrat Arvind Kumar in December 2016 came up during discussion in the Assembly in December 2023. For newbies, Arvind had written a letter to the KCR government questioning the power purchase agreement (PPA) with the Chhattisgarh government. He had pointed out then that Telangana State would lose Rs 10,000 cr on account of the PPA, considering that the agreed power charges per unit had been determined at a higher rate. It was in January 2017 that he was shunted out as Resident Commissioner of Telangana Bhavan. Yours truly saw that, in a bid to tame the Opposition charge, newspaper clippings of Arvind’s letter were seen near the CM’s lobby in the Assembly. Even as IAS officers were blamed, these ‘powerful’ clippings caught the attention of a few on how bureaucracy has changed over the years.