A year ago the launch function of the O. P. Jindal group’s integrated steel project in West Bengal’s Paschim Medinipuir district was greeted with a bomb blast by suspected Maoists on the entourage of Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. The Chief Minister escaped the attack by a whisker, but the police action that followed sparked widespread agitation, which has now snowballed into a movement which is suspected to have the active backing of the Maoists.
A year-to-date, the promoters say that they were still interested in the project, and work would start by April 2011.
“We are still invested,” Biswadip Gupta, Joint Managing Director and CEO of JSW Bengal told The Hindu . He said that the project had been “debundled, keeping in mind certain ground realities”.
Given the project’s sensitive location, some 50 km east of Lalgarh, the epicentre of the State’s Maoist movement, people are now in express need of some assurance on the project’s plight and the promoters’ intent.
Following JSW’s recent decision to implement the project from the power plant-end and shifting the Rs. 7,680-crore power plant under group company JSW Energy, it has now been decided that work would start on the first phase (800 MW) of the power plant from April.
Alongside, work on the refurbishment of the ITI at Jhargram, which was taken over by the Jindals in 2007, is getting completed.
