Posco India in damage control mode

To meet government officials soon

Barely a week after publicly venting its discontent against the state government for not lifting restriction on entry of its officials to the project site, Posco India is understood to have taken a u-turn.

The company authorities are planning to meet the state government's top brass soon in a bid to ease the strained relations between the two sides.

The meeting between Posco and government officials is seen as a damage control exercise by the steel major in the aftermath of a recent seminar by the company which is believed to have irked the state government.

A top Posco India official confirmed the visit of company officials later this month. He, however, refused to divulge the itinerary of the visit.

Top government officials were not immediately available for comments on the matter.

On last Saturday, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik stressed on implementing the Posco project with caution, hinting at the rift between the government and Posco India authorities.

Though the project has been battling protests over land acquisition from locals, government support for the big ticket project has been more or less un-stinted, be it facilitating land acquisition or pushing the company's case for mining lease application.

However, the tirade of Posco chairman and managing director Yong-Won Woon against the state government at the company sponsored global engineering seminar held at Paradip on last Thursday for not lifting the restriction on site visit by the company officials seems to have done the damage.

And with top government functionaries skipping the seminar, the guessing game relating to the project’s future has started among the different stakeholders of the project.

It may be noted that Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation of Orissa (Idco) had cautioned Posco against organizing any seminar at the project site since the ground situation did not favour the holding of such a meet especially in the aftermath of the recently concluded panchayat elections in the state and release of controversial local contractor Bapi Sarkhel on bail. Sarkhel was nabbed in connection with a bloody violence that had erupted between supporters and opponents of the project on December 14, last year, during construction of the coastal corridor. The state government's land acquisition agency had even warned that organizing any such meet would jeopardize the best interest of the country's biggest FDI project.