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, headquarters of the Bastar division.
“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 NMDC said. NMDC had 995 acres in possession and had to acquire 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 least one person from a project 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 has been grappling with resistance 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 were yet to take off. While the first bricks for NMDC’s project would be laid by the year-end. What has NMDC done right? “We have always carried the people with us for many years. We offer scholarships to 15,000 students a year,” Som pointed out.
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 had to face the wrath of Naxals. The company’s bottom line was impacted significantly when Naxalites blasted the Essar pipeline.
The 267-km Essar pipeline which carried iron ore slurry from a beneficiation plant at Bailadila to its pellet plant at Vishakhapatnam (Andhra Pradesh) was blown up by Naxalites in June 2009 near Chitrangonda (Orissa) close to the Chhattisgarh border. That took away about Rs 925 crore from NMDC’s net profit in 2009-10.
