PARADIP: With Essar Steel withdrawing its proposed project at Handia village in Jagatsinghpur district and the local authorities stopping developmental activities, the villagers have been left in a lurch.
As per reports, Essar Steel is setting up a 12 million tonne pellet plant in Paradip with an aim to increase the production capacity to a whopping 24 million tonne per annum in future. The company had also planned to set up an Integrated Steel Plant (ISP) with 6 million tonne production capacity per annum at Handia later. Essar had sought intervention of the State Government to provide land at the village for its ISP plant.
As the company required 394 acre of land at Handia for the ISP, the administration had issued notice to nearly 80 families residing in the village for their displacement under section 4 (1) of Land Acquisition Act in 2008. The administration even decided to stop development activities in the village due to the proposal for displacement of its residents.Following strong protests by villagers over the move to stop development activities, the administration decided to provide health services, drinking water facilities and road connectivity till February 14, 2014 as displacement process had not been initiated by Essar Steel.
However in February 19 2016, the company informed the State Government that it has changed its plans and will not set up the ISP plant at Paradip. Hence, the villagers of Handia will not be rehabilitated.
In a press meet on Monday, activists of Gramya Surakhya Samiti said the affected families of Handia are living in pathetic conditions due to lack of developmental activities. Claiming that Essar Steel is harassing the locals by not providing employment opportunities, samiti president Akshya Mohanty demanded rehabilitation of villagers as per R&R policy, provision of permanent jobs to unemployed youths who have been trained by the company besides degree and diploma engineers and hike in remuneration of workers engaged in Essar. If the Government fails to resolve the issue, the villagers would launch an agitation, threatened Mohanty.
A senior official of Essar Steel said, “We have no plan to displace villagers of Handia and the company has decided to resolve their issues with the help of administration. We have decided to give employment opportunity to one member from each family and 80 persons have been selected for training.”