Centre terminates services of SECI Chairman R P Gupta with immediate effect

SECI was at the heart of several controversies involving Adani, JSW & R-Power

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The Union government has terminated the services of R P Gupta, chairman and managing director of Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI), with “immediate effect.”

 

Business Standard has reviewed the copy of the order by the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet dated May 10, 2025. 

Gupta said "no comment" over a text message in response to a query by this paper on his termination. 

 

The order did not reveal any reason for his termination. Gupta, a retired IAS officer of Gujarat cadre, had served his last posting as the secretary, ministry of environment, forest, and climate change.

 

Gupta was at the helm of SECI from June 2023 and his tenure was supposed to end next month. This abrupt termination comes in the wake of several controversies involving SECI and various sector majors. At the same time, the core task of SECI to sell-purchase renewable energy (RE) has come under severe criticism, with the agency facing a major backlog.

 

Close to 40-gigawatt renewable energy (RE) projects tendered by the four ‘Renewable Energy Implementation Agencies (REIAs) designated by ministry of new and renewable energy have failed to find buyers for their green power, it was reported earlier.

 

 

SECI was the first REIA appointed by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) since 2011 to tender RE projects, which includes solar, wind, hybrid, firm and dispatchable renewable energy (FDRE), and battery storage. Out of the 40, SECI has close to 12 Gw of projects where power sale agreement (PSA) or power purchase agreement (PPA) is pending.

 

The lack of PPAs and PSAs is also at the heart of the controversial corruption case filed by the United States Attorney, Eastern District of New York against the Adani Group and NYSE-listed Azure Power. The matter dates back to 2019-2020 when SECI issued record-high tenders worth 30 Gw.

 

 

Most of these projects failed to find any buyers. The list included mega size solar power projects of leading players such as Adani Green Energy, ReNew Power, SoftBank Energy, Azure Power, ACME Solar among others. This also included the 7 Gw manufacturing-linked solar tender floated by SECI in January 2020. According to the According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s investigation, Adani and Azure then “started a cycle of bribing state governments to get favourable PSAs.”

 

SECI’s own internal operations have also been under scrutiny. Last October, Business Standard had reported citing several official documents and email trails how Anil Ambani-owned Reliance Power submitted invalid bank documents for a tender floated by SECI, and yet the central public sector company allowed it to participate in the bidding.

      Reliance Power even claimed the State Bank of India (SBI) as guarantor for its bank guarantee, which SBI later denied. The bank flagged the SBI email ID used in the communication by Reliance Power as fake, following which SECI scrapped the process and barred the company.  

The Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC), the quasi-judicial apex sector regulator, in January rejected the tariff discovered in the first-ever grid scale battery energy storage system (BESS) awarded by SECI in 2022.

 

 

 

CERC has cited “delay in signing power supply and purchase agreements (PSA and PPA)” and reduction in BESS prices over the last two years as the reason for rejecting the tariff. This was the first BESS tender issued after the standard bidding guidelines were issued by the Ministry of Power for energy storage projects in the country. The winning bidder JSW Energy in an exchange notification in January said it has moved the court to challenge this decision.