The Japan International Cooperation Agency will conduct a feasibility study for setting up a 450MW power plant at Bheramara, Power Division sources said.

The Japanese government agency last week informed the division that it would send an 11-member mission to Bangladesh to discuss about the study from October 28 to November 8, they said.

The Bheramara 450MW power plant is one of the major projects for which the Power Division has been searching for funds for years.

Although the Power Development Board initiated the move to set up the plant in 1995, the plant is yet to be installed due to bureaucratic tangles and lack of fund.

Power Division officials are now expecting to get the fund from Japan after the JICA had expressed interest to conduct the feasibility study.

‘After the feasibility study, the JICA will decide about funding the project. We are hopeful about getting the fund from Japan,’ power secretary M Fouzul Kabir Khan told New Age on Monday.

Earlier in August, the division planned to set up the 450MW Bheramara plant under a public-private joint venture.

The Industrial and Infrastructure Development Finance Company Limited and the Investment Corporation of Bangladesh apprised the division that local entrepreneurs and financial institutions and non-resident Bangladeshis had the capability and eagerness to invest about $300 million in a large power plant.

Sources in the division said after the JICA, which had been in contact with the division to conduct a feasibility study for Bheramara plant, came to know about the joint-venture plan, it formally sent a letter last week to the division informing about sending the mission.

The PDB or any of its subsidiaries will now set up the power plant at Bheramara, they said.

When his attention was drawn to the joint-venture plan, Fouzul said they still had a plan for setting up a large power plant under a joint venture. ‘If we get the Japanese fund for Bheramara, we will set up a power plant under joint venture at another site,’ he said.

The Japan Bank of International Cooperation is, meanwhile, providing the government $144 million for setting up the 360MW new Haripur power plant.