The civil construction work on the Rs 5,000-crore alumina refinery project of Utkal Alumina International Limited (UAIL), a subsidiary of the Aditya Birla Group (ABG), is now mired in uncertainty following the failure of the tripartite talks among the company officials, affected people and the district administration.
The work on the alumina refinery project, being set up near Kasipur in south Orissa’s Rayagada district, has been stalled for over a month due to agitation of the locals over payment of compensation.
The talks failed as the project affected people were unrelenting in their demand for higher compensation for their lands acquired by the company, sources said.
The tripartite meeting was held recently at Rayagada to find out a solution and to convince the agitators to enable the commencement of construction work.
The meeting was attended by K Mohapatra, the district collector, SK Mishra, chief executive of the project and the representatives of the project affected people (PAP).
“We are ready to offer an additional Rs one lakh per acre of land, but the people demanded Rs 3.44 lakh per acre” said Mishra.
“We are not in a position to provide higher amount to the PAP, when the government has decided the value of the land”, Mishra told Business Standard.
The value of the land was decided at a high-level meeting presided over by the state chief secretary, Ajit Tripathy in February.
The affected people have demanded Rs 3.44 lakh per acre of the land to be acquired for the project and a job to at least one member of each of the affected families in the company.
“We will not allow the company people to go ahead with the construction work if they do not fulfill our demand”, said Bhagaban Majhi, the convener of the Prakutika Sampad Surakhya Parisad, an organisation spearheading the agitation against the alumina refinery project.
About 2,300 acres of land was acquired by the company to set up a 1.5 million tonne alumina refinery project. The villagers of about 108 villages in three blocks would be affected by the project, Majhi claimed.
Company sources, however, said the PAPs have already been given an ex-gratia compensation in early 2005 over and above the compensation paid in 1996 according to the state guidelines.
While in 1995-96, the affected people were given Rs 30,000 per acre, an additional Rs 80,000 was paid in 2005-06, added company sources.
“This time the government had directed us to pay Rs 1 lakh per acre more as compensation and we are ready to pay this amount” sources informed.
The company had already spent about Rs 1,000 crore on the project and the project was expected to start functioning from July 2011.
“We are trying to convince the PAPs to expedite civil construction work in order to start production in the scheduled period”, said a senior company official.
The Utkal Alumina refinery project was conceived in 1992 to tap the huge deposits of bauxite in the area and produce alumina. But it has not been able to make much progress due to opposition of the environmentalists and affected people for the past 17 years.
