The country’s largest iron ore producer, NMDC, has acquired the entire private land required for its proposed Rs 15,000-crore steel plant at Jagdalpur, the headquarters of Bastar district of Chhattisgarh.
“This is one of the fastest acquisitions of private land. The first public hearing was held on October 7 last year for this three million tonne steel plant,” Rana Som, chairman and managing director of NMDC, said. NMDC, which had 995 acres in possession, acquired 788 acres of private land.
What convinced the tribals of Jagdalpur was the rehabilitation package offered by NMDC. Apart from a compensation of Rs 9.5 lakh to Rs 11 lakh an acre, NMDC would be providing employment to at least one person per affected family.
“We are building a residential school. It will be an English medium school for which we have selected about 120 students. They are future managers,” Som said.
Chhattisgarh is witnessing resistance by locals against land acquisition, and Tata Steel and Essar Steel have borne the brunt of it. The companies signed memoranda of understanding (MoUs) with the Chhattisgarh government in 2004, but the projects are yet to take off, while the first brick for NMDC’s project would be laid by the year-end.
So, how did NMDC manage? “We have always carried the people with us. We offer scholarships to 15,000 students a year,” Som explained.
Moreover, NMDC has been operating in Chhattisgarh, the Naxal heartland, since the 1960s. The company has some of the best iron ore deposits in Chhattisgarh: Bailadila. Bailadila has 14 deposits, with reserves of around 1.2 billion tonnes, having 66 per cent iron ore.
But it’s not that NMDC has not faced the wrath of Naxals. The company’s bottom line was impacted significantly when Naxalites blasted the Essar pipeline. The 267-kilometre Essar pipeline, which used to carry iron ore slurry from a plant at Bailadila to its pellet plant at Visakhapatnam (Andhra Pradesh), was blown up by Naxalites in June 2009 near Chitragonda (Orissa), close to the Chhattisgarh border. That took away about Rs 925 crore from NMDC’s net profit in 2009-10.