The State Government’s undue haste in showing favour in several ways to Posco, the latest being permission to draw water from the Mahanadi and Hansua rivers, has come under sharp criticism from various quarters, including political parties, environmentalists, local people and intellectuals. Probably, this is a reason why the largest FDI project in the country is still virtually a non-starter.
From according various clearances to land acquisition, the Posco steel plant has been facing several hindrances; the most difficult one being the longest protest movement launched against it by a local outfit with a leftist tilt — The Posco Pratirodha Sangram Samiti (PPSS). The outfit wants the project scrapped, once and for all. Its motto is not to let a single inch of land, considered to be covering human settlements, fertile corn fields and economically viable betel vines, to the South Korean major. The PPSS, despite repressive attitude of the State Government, is still alive and kicking. Its leader Abhaya Sahoo has been jailed and subjected to harassment and torture at several points of time, yet he is unrelenting and dead set in his mission. His movement argues that the Posco and the State Government are in nexus and are bent on pursuing the project at the cost of local environment and its populace. Besides, it questions the raison d’être of approving the project in an area that is self sustainable for its agriculture and fishing. It demands that the project get transferred to a barren land, where environment and human cost is minimal. The most noticeable part of the agitation is that it has successfully highlighted the forced displacement of their locals by local administration and issues of human rights violations. As a result, internationally, the mode of setting up the steel plant has earned wide condemnation and disapproval.
Divide and rule, policy that the Britishers had adopted to acquire India, has been the State Government’s primary weapon to stifle the popular resistance. The local villagers have been split with a group coming forward to support the project. They have been brainwashed that the project would herald an era of economic prosperity in the area and open the flood gate of jobs for the local youths. Almost under the impact of the opium of a development theory, a handful of villagers have turned supporters of the steel plant. But they too have not made the path of the project all rosy. They have laid down several conditions.
Though a long time has been wasted in taking forward the project with the cost of the delay weighing heavy on the company, still neither the State Government nor the Posco has lost hope. Recently, the Posco boundary wall work was underway at full throttle. There had been sporadic skirmishes such as the ones in which irate villagers had set ablaze Posco site offices and razed its boundary walls. Notwithstanding all that, the State Government and the Posco are on the job.
In the recent case, the project has been in the eye of a storm for sanction of permission by the State Water Resources department to the Posco to draw water from the Mahanadi and Hansua rivers. This was done when no fresh impact assessment of the project and the technology to be adopted to draw water and treat it was made. Besides, the local people, the environmentalists and other stakeholders of the projects were not taken into confidence before giving the nod. The people of the State were kept in dark regarding the quantum of water to be given to Posco and if after this there will be sufficient water in the Mahanadi and Hansua rivers for irrigation and drinking.
Big ticket projects are for-of-and-by the big people. There is little to doubt that the lion’s share of the growth these units are supposed to bring in go to the people in the upper strata, constituting bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, businessmen, technocrats and politicians.locals are no doubt given jobs, but mostly they are petty and that too after they have sacrificed their hearth and home.