450 families

South Korean steel-maker Posco's Indian executives are still hoping that, by March next year, they will get possession of the land promised by the Orissa government, and that the first phase of their 12-million-tonne steel plant will be ready on schedule by 2010. That hope may still materialise, but what is worth noting is that the entire project is being held up by just 450 families. According to Posco-India, half these families are situated on 3,500 acres of government land that has been identified for purchase by the company. Technically, they are encroachers; yet the Orissa government is in no position to do anything about them. Indeed, when the land's sale was notified last November, 6,000 objections were filed, of which 3,500 have been heard in the tehsil office. Since the company will have to give answers to all these objections, and also those that will arise when a similar notification is given to acquire another 380 acres of privately-held land, the land acquisition process is unlikely to get resolved quickly. This is despite the fact that Posco has changed the plan of its proposed plant to reduce the land requirement from 5,000 acres to around 4,000 now, so as to reduce the number of families that will be displaced from 2,000 earlier to 450 now.

That still leaves the mining part of the business. Given the manner in which the Steel Authority of India Ltd has challenged in court the Jharkhand government's proposal to allot the Chiria iron ore mines for the LN Mittal Group's proposed steel plant there, Posco's mines may face similar hurdles. As it happens, Orissa stands to get 48,000 permanent jobs from the plant (and 467,000 during the construction phase), and an annual average tax revenue of Rs 750 crore (and the Centre four times as much) over 30 years. Surely, there must be a way of squaring the circle. If the issue is better compensation for those who are forced to give up land against their will, in the larger public interest, then that should be considered.

The short point is that state governments must find a way to speed up land acquisition (and ensure that the land already acquired stays free of encroachers). It is equally important that ways be devised to speed up the legal process. In the case of the telecom sector, which is still the country's most successful infrastructure privatisation effort, the solution was to make the Telecom Dispute Settlement Appellate Tribunal the first court of appeal; if you were dissatisfied with that, the next appeal was only to the Supreme Court. Perhaps for large projects like Posco's, state governments need to come out with a similar proposal. Given that a large number of objections are filed by people who really have no locus standi, or in the names of people who don't even understand the issues supposedly raised by them, it is obvious that abuse of the legal process is one of the problems.