No end in sight for Posco's pain
Last Saturday, about three weeks after the Supreme Court allowed diversion of forest land for setting up a 12-million-tonne steel plant by Posco in Orissa, some villagers of Noliasahi, within the project site, chased away a survey team of the forest department that had gone there to map the forest land.
The villagers wanted to make a clear statement -they will not vacate the land.
Posco proposed to acquire 4,004 acres for its Rs 52,000-crore (Rs 520 billion) steel plant and captive port near Paradip, out of which 3,566 acres was government land and 438 acres was private land.
Of the total stretch, 3,097 acres was forest land, which was recently released by the Supreme Court. This was expected to facilitate the handing over of the land, at least the government portion of it, to the company. But the ground situation does not seem so.
The sorry state of affairs is clear from the fact that even after three years after the signing of the MoU, the government has not been able to provide the company even the non-forest government land. It has, on paper, allotted 193 acres out of 607 acres of non-forest government land, but the company has got physical possession of only seven acres. The slow progress is mainly because of encroachment on government land and stiff resistance from the locals.
The project opponents have their own strategy. They plan to intensify the encroachment of government land, both forest and non-forest.
In a direct challenge to the state revenue authorities, the Posco Pratirodh Sangram Samiti, spearheading the anti-Posco agitation, has identified 2,000 acres from the 3,097 acres taken out of the forest category for occupation and called upon the villagers to take over the area. Responding to the call, some villagers have started fencing large chunks of government land.
Besides, the PPSS intends to frustrate the land acquisition efforts of the government by engaging it in a legal tangle using the provisions of the ST and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act 2006.
Image: Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) activists burn an effigy of Orissa chief minister Naveen Patnaik. The activists allege that the state government has forcibly taken land from villagers to allow the construction of steel giant Posco's plant. | Photograph: Findlay Kemper/AFP/Getty Images
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