The Divisional Forest Officer here has served a show-cause notice on Jindal Steel and Power Ltd (JSPL), which is setting up a six-million tonne steel plant here, for alleged violation of central guidelines on initiating construction activities on non-forest land.
Issued on October 5, it directed the company to stop work on the land, according to the conservator of forests, Angul circle.
The DFO, S S Mishra, said central guidelines say if a project site has both forest and non-forest land, no construction work can be started on the latter till clearance is had for diversion of the forest land.
The notice is a severe setback to JSPL, which had started work on 200 acres of non-forest land, with a target to commission the project in 2011. Unlike other mega projects in the state proposed by Posco, Tata Steel and ArcelorMittal, which are facing land acquisition problems, JSPL had acquired almost all of its required land and started the work.
JSPL required 2,018 hectares of land, of which 168 hectares are forest land. The rest was private and government land.
According to forest department sources, environmental clearance for the Rs 15,000 crore project was obtained in 2007, but the stage-one forest clearance is yet to come.
When asked, a company spokesman said, “We were bound to start the work on the non-forest government land to meet the conditions of the state-owned Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation (Idco), land acquiring agency for the project. While transferring land to us, Idco had set a condition that the land should be used within two years, otherwise it will revert to the government. Besides, the company had got consent from the state government on March 2007 to establish the project on the acquired land.”
