The Steel Authority of India’s (SAIl) donation of Rs 2 crore to the Chief Minister’s Relief Fund and plans to offer midday meal for 45,000 students are really peanuts compared to the benefit it gets in terms of the minerals from Odisha at very cheap prices.
The SAIl should at least fund and make the Biju Patnaik National Steel Institute (BPNSI), an institute at the level of Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Petroleum Technology mainly funded by the oil PSUs (RGIPT), upgrade the Indira Gandhi Hospital in Rourkela to a medical college and put them together with additional programmes to make the beginning of a good university, demanded non-resident Odia (NRO) Professor Chitta Baral of Arizona State University.
He said that the SAIl’s Bokaro plant has made efforts to establish an engineering college and a medical college in Bokaro and, hence, it should also show similar gesture for Odisha. The PSUs that make huge profits because of getting minerals at cheap prices are more obligated to do this, especially in building HRD infrastructure so that when the minerals are gone, there are people with skills that can take the country forward.