Why Posco Should Leave

I can still remember how people were dancing and kicking at the bamboo cordons and shouting “Posco Go Back”, when we reached Balitutha, near Parikud in Orissa on April 1, 2008. People from many parts of the state, especially from the scene of anti-displacement struggles (including Kalinga Nagar), had joined the local people and the gathering was huge. Exactly four months earlier, on December 1, 2007, I had seen the same people demonstrate when I reached Dhinkia, the first village to be displaced by the Posco steel project. I was with my friends, mainly activists of ongoing people’s struggle in Orissa. The women were crying and the youth were silent, but their eyes were expressing their anger.

The major controversies around the Posco project are land acquisition of 4,004 acres of land, of which nearly 3,500 acres are government land but now under control of villagers carrying out betel cultivation, the setting up of a private port at Paradeep when there is already a port run by the government, SEZ status to Posco with an estimated loss of Rs 89,000 crore to the government of India and Rs 22,500 crore to the government of Orissa in 30 years, and getting 600 million tonnes of iron ore with a royalty payment of Rs 27/tonne to the government of Orissa when the market price now is Rs 6,000/tonne.