SAIL’S TOWNSHIP at PURANAPANI IS now A GHOST TOWN, BUT A NEW P-P-P PROVIDES NECESSARY HOPE OF REVIVAL BY Sutanu Guru
This small story must start start with a big thanks to Virbdhadra Singh, Union Minister of Cabinet for Steel. While planning this special issue on Nehru’s modern temples, we came up with a late idea of going to Rourkela, where the Nehru vision was fused with German engineering to create Rourkela Steel Plant, a key member of the Steel Authority of India (SAIL) family. A request sent to the minister’s office was processed as fast as you take to download a song from iTunes. And I had the opportunity of going to some places which most analysts and pundits talking and writing about SAIL and Rourkela Steel Plant usually tend to forget or ignore.
For me personally, it was the nth visit to the steel city, having gone there often during my school and college days in the 1970s and 80s when the word ‘Public Sector’ was something small town middle class Indians desperately wanted to be part of. Going down a mine shaft is a heady as well as scary experience; and you cannot avoid mines when you talk about steel. But more intriguing for me was a visit to a small place called Purunapani; a town, a hamlet, a desolate outpost of industrialization or harbinger of how public sector India is now rediscovering itself through strategic alliances with private sector companies and entrepreneurs.
“This mine was more than 60 metres deep. And limestone used to be sent from here to our plant and other places night and days”, says Jogeswar Badaik, Mines Manager, who is in charge of this outpost. Badaik is quintessentially middle class Indian; he has worked his way through to an office where he can press a buzzer that has a man come scurrying across to fetch tea and refreshments. He is worried about his child who is down with a flu; but he tells me confidently that the SAIL hospital in Rourkela can handle any problem. I am more interested in what were once upon a time mines that fed the industrial juggernaut in Rourkela.
This small story must start start with a big thanks to Virbdhadra Singh, Union Minister of Cabinet for Steel. While planning this special issue on Nehru’s modern temples, we came up with a late idea of going to Rourkela, where the Nehru vision was fused with German engineering to create Rourkela Steel Plant, a key member of the Steel Authority of India (SAIL) family. A request sent to the minister’s office was processed as fast as you take to download a song from iTunes. And I had the opportunity of going to some places which most analysts and pundits talking and writing about SAIL and Rourkela Steel Plant usually tend to forget or ignore.
For me personally, it was the nth visit to the steel city, having gone there often during my school and college days in the 1970s and 80s when the word ‘Public Sector’ was something small town middle class Indians desperately wanted to be part of. Going down a mine shaft is a heady as well as scary experience; and you cannot avoid mines when you talk about steel. But more intriguing for me was a visit to a small place called Purunapani; a town, a hamlet, a desolate outpost of industrialization or harbinger of how public sector India is now rediscovering itself through strategic alliances with private sector companies and entrepreneurs.
“This mine was more than 60 metres deep. And limestone used to be sent from here to our plant and other places night and days”, says Jogeswar Badaik, Mines Manager, who is in charge of this outpost. Badaik is quintessentially middle class Indian; he has worked his way through to an office where he can press a buzzer that has a man come scurrying across to fetch tea and refreshments. He is worried about his child who is down with a flu; but he tells me confidently that the SAIL hospital in Rourkela can handle any problem. I am more interested in what were once upon a time mines that fed the industrial juggernaut in Rourkela.
Read these article :-
