Mahtab Alam examines the trouble with the steel project and suggests a way out THE PROPOSED mega POSCO project and the anti-POSCO movement are back in the news after the violence at the proposed site on 16 July. According to the reports I got, on that day, eight platoons of police attacked and lathicharged peaceful protesters in the village of Nuagaon, Jagatsinghpur district, Odisha. The protesters, despite being mostly women, were...

-The Indian Express   The way to POSCO project remained blocked with irate villagers of Mathsahi and Balisahi of Nuagaon panchayat opposing work for the fourth day on Wednesday. Incidentally, these two villages are main entry points to Nuagaon and Dhinkia panchayats and the administration had planned to take up work in other hamlets after felling trees here. While the recent face-off between villagers and police turned POSCO supporters into antagonists, the...

Work on POSCO project at the project affected villages of Nuagaon and Gadakujang was stalled for the fourth consecutive day due to agitation at two important junctions. The agitators have been staging dharna at Mathsahi, the boundary of Nuagaon panchayat and Balisahi, the entry point to Nuagaon and Dhinkia panchayats. These protesters pressed for the fulfillment of their demands including enhanced compensation to land losers. Meanwhile, the district officials are busy convincing...

Kalinganagar/Gobindpur: Tata Steel and POSCO conceived their high-profile projects in Orissa at around the same time— 2004-05. Both faced similar opposition from land owners and saw long delays in meeting schedules. Tata Steel’s plant is under way with a commissioning deadline of October 2013, while POSCO is still stuck at the land-acquisition stage. Nobody really knows when construction will start. In the land-acquisition process—the biggest stumbling block for most new plants—Tata Steel...

Bhubaneswar: Orissa’s steel and mines minister Raghunath Mohanty is faced with the most difficult task of his tenure—orchestrating smooth land acquisition for South Korean steel maker POSCO, maintaining peace in the villages affected by it and responding to pressure from the Central government that wants to showcase the 12-million-tonne (mt) project as one of the successes of its foreign investment policy. With the environment ministry giving its final clearance for the...