Patnaik to meet Posco opponents on Sunday

Orissa Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik today said he would hold direct talks with the opponents of a steel plant that Korean steel major Posco proposes to set up in the state. The meeting will be held in the chief minister’s office on Sunday afternoon.

The Posco Pratirodh Sangram Samiti (PPSS) has been spearheading the protests against the 12-million-tonne project of Posco for the last five years.

“I have agreed to meet PPSS members on Sunday. There was no proposal to shift the site of the Posco project during the discussion,” Patnaik said, following his meeting with the leaders of six political parties — CPI, CPI(M), Forward Bloc, Samajwadi Party, RJD and JMM — in the state secretariat this evening.

All the six parties are sympathisers of PPSS, whose leader Abhay Sahu is a state secretariat member of the CPI.

Patnaik’s announcement comes at a time when the state government needs to renew the memorandum of understanding (MoU) it had signed with Posco’s Indian subsidiary on June 22, 2005, as the term of the pact is coming to end this month.

There was more ‘desperation’ behind the decision, as the chief minister had assured South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, who had visited India in January, that the state government would provide land to the steel major in six months.

Sunday’s meeting is also significant as it will be the first time Patnaik will come face to face with the anti-Posco brigade, which has been opposing land acquisition for the plant in Dhinkia, Nuagaon and Gadakujang panchayats of Jagatsinghpur district.

The chief minister never visited the plant site and held direct talks with the opponents to work out a solution though there had been demands from various quarters.

Dibakar Nayak, the state unit secretary of CPI, said: “We demanded that the chief minister should talk directly to the PPSS leaders on issues relating to the Posco project and he has accepted our proposal.”

He added, “We have urged the chief minister that no police force should enter the Posco site and the on-going socio-economic survey of the project should be suspended till he talks to the PPSS members.”