Bangladesh And Sri Lanka Foil Indian Tycoon Adani’s Bid To Foist Unequal Deals – Analysis
Bangladesh is home to the world's 8th largest population-- composing around 175 million people pressed into one of South Asia's most dynamic developmental arcs. Meeting the power needs of such scale is not a peripheral challenge; it is resoundingly structural. Presently, Bangladesh ranks 32nd globally in total electricity consumption, yet that ranking obscures more than it reveals: since 2000, total electricity use in the country has expanded by roughly 550%, an almost unparalleled jump in demand and industrialization.
This surge is not a historical footnote. Rather, it reflects a nation still early in its economic ascent, with a rapidly growing population and abundant room to climb within the global developmental hierarchy. Far from plateauing, Bangladesh's electricity demand appears set to accelerate, driven not by excess but by sheer necessity-- as households urbanize, factories proliferate, and the power grid struggles to keep pace with ambitions that outstrip capacity.
As Bangladesh's developmental ambitions continue to outstrip its structural capacity, the country -- like many developing economies -- has looked to the dividends of globalisation, particularly through cross-border trade with its neighbour India. Yet where such arrangements are defined by asymmetry, power-trade partnerships rarely come without cost. They tend to function as double-edged instruments: capable of easing immediate constraints, while embedding longer-term dependencies that are far harder to unwind.
During the Sheikh Hasina regime, Bangladesh has increasingly relied on cross-border power imports from India, under Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party-- a strategy framed by both long-standing allies as pragmatic regional cooperation, though critics have long warned that cross-border grid dependencies in South Asia tend to accentuate asymmetries rather than counteract them. Within this framework, no single project has assumed greater structural importance than the electricity supplied by the Adani Group from its coal-fired power plant in Godda, Jharkhand.
Commissioned in 2023, the 1,600-megawatt Godda Ultra Super-Critical Thermal Power Plant is India's first transnational power project where 100% of generated electricity is supplied to another country. Under a 25-year power purchase agreement signed in November 2017, Adani Power Jharkhand Ltd is contracted to export 1,496 MW to the Bangladesh Power Development Board via a dedicated 400 kV transmission line connected directly to Bangladesh's national grid. This translates to around 10% of Bangladesh's total electricity being supplied by the Adani Group.
Yet the defining feature of the Godda arrangement is not merely its scale, but its location and concentration of control: making it structurally consequential and increasingly contentious. The plant is situated deep within Indian territory, entirely outside of Bangladeshi jurisdiction, while its operation is governed by a long-term contract whose enforcement ultimately depends on the stability of bilateral relations. In a region where political alignments are seldom static -- this is not a trivial exposure, rather a consequential threat to Bangladeshi national security
Although the project is formally structured as a commercial transaction with a private supplier, the proximity between favoured Indian conglomerates and the BJP leaves little room for a neat separation between corporate interest and geopolitical leverage. Bangladesh's dependence, therefore, is not simply on imported electricity, but on the continued alignment of political, commercial, and diplomatic interests beyond its borders.
The controversy surrounding the power purchase agreement is not limited to the concept of cross-border power trade itself. Another pertinent issue that is exceedingly concerning in its own right, lies in the terms under which electricity is supplied. Official reviews in Bangladesh have argued that these terms shift a disproportionate share of cost and risk onto the buyer.
Under the power purchase agreement signed in 2017 between the Bangladesh Power Development Board and Adani Power Jharkhand Ltd, Bangladesh committed to purchasing electricity at a tariff conspicuously higher than that paid to other Indian suppliers. Figures cited by Reuters show that in the 2023-2024 fiscal year, Bangladesh paid an average of 14.87 taka per unit to Adani, compared with 9.57 taka per unit for power imported from other Indian producers.
A government-appointed National Review Committee later concluded that the Adani deal carried a pricing premium of nearly 40 percent relative to comparable private-sector contracts. It pointed to coal pricing mechanisms, tax pass-through provisions, and contractual protections that insulated the supplier while constraining Bangladesh's ability to recalibrate costs as market conditions shifted. The tariff paid to Adani is higher because the agreement is not market-linked. It is a project-specific, long-term power purchase arrangement designed to fully recover capital costs, operating expenses, tax exposure, and currency risk over the life of the contract.
Since the Godda plant was built exclusively to supply Bangladesh, the transaction does not draw from India's existing power market. Instead, it operates outside it. This distinction is crucial because in the absence of market linkage, the constraints of usual pricing disciplines which include competitive bidding, regulatory benchmarking, and exchange-based discovery are shed. With government approvals in place headed by the Awami League and BJP, the project was able to determine its own cost-recovery parameters, effectively converting what is presented as power trade into a crony capitalist-driven project financing-- shaped less by competition than by political proximity.
Taken together, the Godda arrangement illustrates how appeasement, asymmetry, and political convenience can calcify into long-term structural harm. What was presented as pragmatic cooperation instead bound a material share of Bangladesh's baseload power to a single external project -- geographically remote, contractually rigid, and shielded from the pricing disciplines that ordinarily protect the public interest.
Bangladesh's experience is not unique. In Sri Lanka, the proposed Adani-backed Mannar wind power project was met with sustained local protests, as residents, environmental groups, and civil society actors mobilised against opaque approvals, environmental risk, and threats to livelihoods. These demonstrations, reinforced by legal challenges, forced the project into renewed scrutiny under a new administration -- after which Adani withdrew. In Kenya, large Adani-linked airport and power transmission deals were cancelled following public protests and labour resistance. In both cases, once public opposition pierced political insulation, the deals proved difficult to sustain.
Crucially, this agreement was not an inevitability imposed on Bangladesh, but a choice shaped by the priorities of the Hasina regime. In cultivating proximity with Adani, the government privileged speed, optics, and political alignment over competition, transparency, and long-term resilience. The costs of that decision are now embedded in a 25-year contract whose risks are borne not by policymakers or counterparties, but by the Bangladeshi public.
The power flows. But it does so on terms that reflect concentrated leverage rather than balanced exchange -- leaving ordinary Bangladeshis to absorb the fiscal and structural consequences of a deal that will outlast the regime that signed it.