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Sell out by India’s Environment Ministry over the POSCO Project

Full text of Press Release by Posco Pratirodh Sangram Samiti, Orissa, India

1 February 2011

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Posco Pratirodh Sangram Samiti

Dhinkia, Nuagaon, Gadkujang; Jagatsinghpur District, Orissa

PRESS RELEASE: 31 January 2011

Scandalous Decision of Jairam Ramesh to OK POSCO project

Environment Minister disregards findings of his own Review and Statutory Clearances Committees

The decision of Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh to give a comprehensive OK to the POSCO India Steel-Power Production-Captive Port project, based on some additional conditions, is nothing short of a total sell out to the politics of power and international capital. In a climate where each and every Minister of the Union Government is tumbling over with scandals, Ramesh had stood tall taking one brave legally and ethically correct decision after another. An acid test for him to continue this streak of decision making in the wider public interest, keeping in view intergenerational interests as well, was about the POSCO project. By his decision today to clear the project Ramesh has failed not only his own legacy, but has attacked the very rule of law based decision making that he has so often been harping on to be the basis of his functioning.

It is well known that the POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samithi, a peaceful movement of affected communities, has been systematically raising the deep, inter-generational and irreversible impacts of allowing this massive project to come up in the ecologically sensitive Jagatsinghpur district of Orissa. This struggle began with the inking of a most controversial MOU between Orissa State and Korea’s Pohang Steel (POSCO) in 2005, proposing to establish the largest industrial project ever conceived in human history: a 12 MTPA steel plant backed by captive power plant; a captive port (described as “small†but designed to receive the largest commercial ships ever built - of CAPESIZE variety); a large township to accommodate over 100000 people; a large captive mine in Kandadhar (600 MT for local processing and 400 MT for export over 30 years); fresh water intake from over 100 kms. away (while denying many towns and cities drinking water) and extensive road and rail infrastructure to support the project.

The 4000 acres of land chosen for the plant site comprise of pristine coastal and deltaic ecosystems, with active nesting sites for the critically endangered Olive Ridley Turtles and the Horse Shoe Crabs. Over a third of this land comprises of coastal forests. Over 22000 people will be directly displaced by the steel plant alone, a number that has been repeatedly disputed by Orissa Government based on its spurious claims. Absolutely no impact assessment of any academic rigour worth its salt or regulatory review of value considering the mega scale of this project, has at all been conducted to support the project is environmentally and socially useful. In fact, the so-called Rapid Environment Impact Assessment reports prepared by M/s Dastur for POSCO India, was only for 4 MTPA steel production and not for the entire project as is required by law. Clearly against statutory standards and norms, the project was still accorded environmental, forest and coastal regulation zone clearances in 2007. In addition, the Orissa Government engaged the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) to cook up data claiming the benefits from the project as phenomenal, which when verified even cursorily proved to be junk statistics supporting desperate political games promoting the project.