From a thin airstrip to a green energy park five times the size of Paris

A NARROW AIRSTRIP that doesn't even have an air traffic controller to guide incoming airplanes and whose only infrastructure is a portable toilet and a make-shift office in a container in the midst of miles of barren land bordering Pakistan is an unlikely gateway to the world's largest renewable energy park.

- AMMAR ZAIDI

The airstrip was even smaller in December 2022, when Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani, who was then the second-richest person in the world, first used a small aircraft to reach the barren area that didn't even have a pincode and got its name from a village 80 kilometre away.

The land hardly had anyvegetation due to its highly saline soil, leave alone any habitation.

But the area with second-best solar radiation in the country after Ladakh and wind speeds five times of plains, served as an idle location for a renewable energy park.

An 18-km drive from the airstrip through dusty arid land is the site for his group's Khavda renewable energy park spread over 538 sq km (roughly five times the size of Paris).

When Adani first landed at Khavda, he joked if anyone could even find a mosquito in the area, his executives said.

But since then, his group has not just laid solar panels that will convert sun rays into electricity and windmills to harness wind blowing at the speed of 8 metre per second, but also built colonies for workers, put up desalination plants to make saline water pumped out of 700 m below ground portable and utilities such as mobile phone repair shops.