Author: Ayaskant Das

By Ayaskant Das & Paranjoy Guha Thakurta What began as an allocation of 887 acres of fertile farmland to set up a power plant in Odisha has morphed into a sordid saga of bankruptcy, a distress sale of the land through an electronic auction to an obscure firm (that appears to be a shell company) at exceptionally low prices, followed by the quiet takeover of the firm by an entity that is part of the JSW Group (earlier Jindal Steel Works), a conglomerate controlled by billionaire businessman Sajjan Jindal. The curious set of transactions has triggered demands for a probe…