The ground-laying ceremony of Bhushan Power & Steel Ltd’s (BPSL?s) Rs 12,000-crore steel plant in Jharkhand was held in the absence of company chairman-cum-managing director Sanjay Singhal and the local MP Arjun Munda as agitation against land acquisition for the project forced them to skip the event.
This is the second major unrest at a steel project in Eastern India over the weekend. On Saturday, police lathicharged protestors at the Posco site in Orissa. This project has been held up for four years.
At the BPSL site, protesters put up barricades blocking a large number of guests from landing up there. The company plans to set up a 3-million tonne per annum (mtpa) steel plant along with a 900-mw power unit at Potka, 30 km from Jamshedpur.
Despite the presence of a sizeable police force around the site and imposition of Section 144 by the district administration, around a thousand villagers from 14 villages of the area blockaded all routes to the site. A vehicle carrying media persons was also stopped initially.
?We want agriculture to continue here; we don’t want industry,? said Kumar Chandra Mardi, one of those leading the agitation. The villagers are protesting under the banner of Vistapan Virodhi Ekta Manch.
The BPSL project is to come up on around 3,219 acre . Of this, 2,792 acre is (riyayti) public land, while 427 acre belong to the government.
The company, however, has so far been successful in buying, through cash, only around 310 acres of public land. The ground-breaking ceremony was held today on a 118-acre portion of the acquired land.
?While the government land would come in due course, the rest of the riyayti land would be acquired under the land acquisition act,? said a BSPL official.
The company claims that against the price of Rs 40,000 per acre fixed by the government for purchase of private land, the company was paying around Rs 4.50 lakh per acre to those giving up land for the project. It was also giving employment to every family as per Jharkhand’s resettlement & rehabilitation policy.