CORUS OF DISAPPROVAL

25-10-2006

The proposed takeover of the steel company Corus by their Indian rivals Tata could affect hundreds of workers employed by the firm in the Black Country. Jeremy Seabrook, just back from India,has few words of comfort.

The stir created by the £4.2billion proposed takeover of the British steel-maker Corus by the Indian Tata conglomerate, has been presented as evidence of India'sgrowing industrial might.

India, now a significant player in the global economy, is also the third largest investor in Britain. We should look upon the country with new respect: far from being the traditional petitioner for aid, help and succour from the West, it is now a major competitor. We should now fear a country, which only yesterday it seems, emerged from colonial tutelage into stagnation, poverty and inertia.

If the 24,000 workers at Corus - (itself the remnant of a British Steel which employed scores of thousands only a generation ago) - are anxious about their jobs, the reassurances of Tata are unlikely to satisfy them.

In January 2006, there was a protest by indigenous peoples at Kalinga Nagar, near Bhubaneshwar in Eastern India. They were demonstrating against the building of boundary walls around the site of a steel mill to be built by Tata. As Tata Company labourers, under the protection of police and government officials, began to level the ground with dynamite and bulldozers in the village of Champakoila, the people sent a delegation to negotiate with government officials over this trespass on private land.

As they moved forward, a villager struck the trip string of the dynamite and it exploded blowing off one of his feet, and injuring three others. Panic ensued. The crowd surged forward and the police fired. Five people were killed instantly. One constable was beaten to death by the villagers. The final death toll was thirteen.

Two days later, the police informed the relatives that they should collect the six bodies held in the hospital morgue. They found that both hands of the six victims had been cut off. The genitals of al four men and the breasts of the two women had been severed.

A report on the incident by the Jharkhand Organisation for Human Rights made explicit the similarity of the response of the authorities to people resisting the takeover of ancestral land to the predations of European colonialisms. It is the misfortune of the Adivasis, the indigenous peoples of central and eastern India, that their lands bestride vast deposits of iron ore and coal, upon which ‘national' development now has prior claim.

Before the Adivasis were killed, they were cheated: the minority who had been compensated received $ 823 an acre, while Tata paid the government $6,670 an acre. Despite a Supreme Court order, 60% of the Adivasis to be displaced by the Tata steel mill were not given the land titles that would entitle them to compensation.

To be abused and then slain by the State for defending their property against a takeover by private interests is a poor advertisement for democracy, and an even poorer one for free enterprise. Although the Tata Company denied it was present on the occasion of the shootings, many of its contractors certainly were.

Kalinga Nagar was planned in 1990 as a Steel City, originally a government-sector undertaking, and an area of 30,000 acres was requisitioned by the government. The law under which this was done was a relic of the colonial era, the Land Requisition Act. The people were promised land in exchange, jobs in the industries, houses, schools and hospitals. None of this materialised; and the only jobs were those as labourers in construction work.

Under the influence of India's liberalisation programme, Steel City was transformed into a private enterprise. The area is already host to industries with a capacity of four million tonnes of steel a year. The Tatas are relatively recent comers, and have been allotted 2,400 acres of land for the construction of a six million tonne plant.

The Tatas, the centenary of the death of whose founder Jamsetji Tata was celebrated last year, had a reputation for philanthropy and significant charitable giving. They set up one of the few grant-making foundations in India, and certainly the largest.

Tatas established many pioneering institutions, including the first institute for higher learning in science, the first for the social sciences, the first cancer hospital and research centre, the first institute for basic research in mathematics and physics.

Official documents from the company insist that Tatas' philanthropic activity continues to evolve, particularly in ‘empowering marginalized communities to take the reins of their own development.' But not, apparently in Kalinga Nagar. It seems that the logic of globalisation has imposed other urgencies upon the company than concern for philanthropic activity.

That India should now be engaged upon an undertaking so reminiscent of the colonial extractive project gives an ironic twist to the proposed takeover of the remnants of a one-time industrial giant of the former imperial power. In the absence of any great respect for the land ownership, or even the lives of poor tribals in its homeland in pursuit of its interests in India, the workers of Corus should, perhaps, regard the takeover of their company with trepidation.

With revenues of $14 billion, Tata accounted for 5% of India's exports and 2.6% of its GDP in 2004. Whatever its illustrious and humane antecedents, it has been overtaken by other imperatives. The ruthlessness with which the iron ore of Orissa and Jharkhand is being stripped from the earth suggests that large-scale cheap production in India will not be inhibited by any great tenderness for Corus workers in Britain or the Netherlands, and even less for the 166,000 depending on its pension fund.