Two Orissa villages oppose Posco

NEW DELHI: The Orissa government bats for it, the PMO is in favour and environment minister Jairam Ramesh has obliged, but the Rs 54,000-crore Posco project has found two difficult adversaries —the villages of Dhinkia and Gobindpur.

The two villages have written to Ramesh, saying they have not agreed to the takeover of forest land for the integrated steel plant under the Forest Rights Act and complained the Act has not been implemented in their lands. This creates a legal impediment for Orissa to give the assurance Ramesh had sought as a precondition to the forest clearance.

Under the Forest Rights Act, consent of the affected village council is mandatory before forest lands can be transferred to any project developer by the state government.

Under the Act, all claims in the forest lands by traditional forest dwellers — tribals and others — have to be settled and the permission of the village council taken before such rights are bought out by the state in favour of any project developer.

With the PMO leaning hard on him to clear the biggest single FDI project, Ramesh overrode his own order which requires such village council permissions on environment ministry records. The environment minister instead left it for the Orissa government to provide an assurance that all rights under FRA had been settled. Under the law, the state government can only give such an assurance once it has permission from the affected village councils.

Now, the two villages have written to the Union minister, stating their rights have not been settled even though they filed their applications for individual and community rights in the forests marked out for the project.

The bulk of the 1,253 hectares of forest land falls within the boundary of these two villages in Jagatsinghpur district.

The letters of complaint received by the ministry come along with copies of the village council resolutions dating back to February 2010 where the villagers had rejected the proposal and re-asserted their rights to the contentious forest patch.

They are also accompanied by affidavits of the sarpanch of Dhinkia, stating they have not received any information, documents or records from the state government regarding the implementation of FRA in the area.

Dhinkia has been the hub of protests against the Korean steel giant and has remained blockaded for long. The N C Saxena panel on FRA as well as the Meena Gupta committee specifically reviewing Posco had found rights of the non-ST population in the area had not been settled. Consequently, the environment ministry`s statutory Forest Advisory Committee had recommended rejection of the forest clearance to the project for violation of FRA. Ramesh had instead preferred to let Orissa come back to it with an assurance, which will now be difficult to prove.

Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com