This is the story of why the world's third largest steel producer — Pohang Steel Corporation (POSCO) — really wants to invest in India. Of how this Rs. 52,000 crore project — India's six largest steel plants combined — got clearance despite internal objections at every stage. Of how data has been concocted, facts misrepresented, vital information withheld, official minutes manipulated, site inspections conducted from a helicopter so India can have its largest FDI. Environmentalists believe Brazil and China have rejected POSCO's proposal. Yet India has welcomed it with open arms.
The POSCO story is now at its most critical stage. How long POSCO's welcome will last depends on crucial choices, on the politics of environment, development and diplomacy, on what India chooses to define as its priorities. It depends on psychology — the notion of power that comes from global linkages; of investment and development as holy cows, of any regulation as a leap backward, the myth that the magic letters — FDI — are the harbinger of prosperity.
TEHELKA has learnt that when the MoU was signed, the Odisha government thought it was trading revenue land. It was when Agriculture Minister Damodar Raut raised a question in the Assembly about the exact classification of it that Revenue Minister Manmohan Shyamal went back to the records. It was only then that they realised that 3,000 acres of the land promised to POSCO was forest land inhabited by 4,000 families.
In the past five years, the project has faced stiff opposition: large-scale protests, police firing, hundreds of injuries, a sarpanch with 42 cases against him, a farmer who cultivates with three bullets lodged in his body. In the past five years, it has become symptomatic of all the major faultlines of an investment-hungry India: a flawed mining policy, land acquisition woes, the question of ownership of natural resources, of public versus private, of fundamental rights and fair compensation, and of growth. Read the full report here.
Source: Tusha Mittal, Tehelka Magazine, New Delhi, Vol 7, Issue 49, Dated December 11, 2010.
