The world’s largest nuclear power plant being built at Jaitapur has claimed its first victim: a 1,000-acre education hub that was to come up in Nate village just 15 km away. Last month, education township promoter Copper Beech Infrastructure Pvt Ltd applied for aborting the project and repatriating the FDI by Barrods Service Ltd of Cyprus, following the government’s announcement in November to set up the 9,900-MW nuclear power plant. “The above announcement has necessitated the company to review its proposed project in Nate village, located only 15 km from Jaitapur,” says the July 29 application to the Foreign Investment Promotion Board. “The project partners have opined it a serious development, the rationale for the project is lost as now it is not tenable, feasible, reasonable, practical, fit and proper to set up education institutions so close to a nuclear power plant. It is therefore now decided to abort the project and repatriate the FDI funds to the investor,” it adds. Copper Beech was incorporated in July 2007 to build a 1,000-acre new township focusing on educational infrastructure — schools, universities and other higher education — at Nate, while creating associated commercial and general facilities there. It later roped in Barrods to get an initial FDI of Rs 39.20 crore to start the land acquisition process. Copper Beech Group was floated by British-Indian business entrepreneur and chairman Dinesh Dhamija, who founded the successful online travel agency Ebookers that he sold in 2005 for £209 million. The Group started Shiksha, a school that provides free education to children of the transient labour population of building site workers up to the age of 12 years. Copper Beech says it held negotiations and even paid advance money to some landowners. “Every possible effort was made to commence the business but to no avail,” it says. It has approached the FIPB to allow money repatriation on special grounds as under the FDI guidelines, overseas investments cannot be repatriated before the end of the three-year lock-in period, which in their case would be April 2012. India’s Nuclear Power Corp and French nuclear energy firm Areva signed the General Framework Agreement and the Early Work Agreement last December after the Ministry of Environment and Forests announced its approval to the project in November. The project entails installing six evolutionary pressurised reactors of 1,650 MW each. While the first phase is expected to be operational by 2018-19 instead of the originally planned 2017-18, the entire project is now scheduled for completion by 2032-33. The Opposition has accused the state government and UPA at the Centre of experimenting with an untested EPR technology, claiming it would be harmful for the region, the state and the country as a whole. The project-affected villagers are demanding that it be scrapped as it would harm their livelihoods. The Centre, however, plans to amend the Atomic Energy Act to enable the government to buy land around all nuclear establishments by issuing a simple notification.