Posco land acquisition runs into rough weather

PARADIP: Land acquisition for Posco steel plant could not be resumed for the second day on Saturday due to heavy rains even as social activists and political leaders rushed to the area to support the anti-displacement brigade.Four teams of revenue officials, led by Paradip Additional District Magistrate Sarojkanta Choudhury, who were at Gobindpur with armed police to resume land acquisition after a six-day break, returned disappointed yet again. “Like yesterday, heavy rains prevented acquisition of land on Saturday also. Our teams were ready, but work could not be started,” Choudhury said.The land acquisition process, which was halted for five days from Sunday because of  ‘Raja’ festival, is likely to be taken up on Monday, if weather permits.“Everything depends on the weather,” Jagatsinghpur district Special Land Acquisition Officer Surjit Das said.Meanwhile, Swami Agnivesh, who spent last night with the affected villagers at Gobindpur, joined the human barricade of schoolchildren, women and villagers of Dhinkia panchayat in their dharna to protest the forcible land acquisition process on Saturday.Addressing a gathering, Agnivesh suggested that the Government should re-negotiate the project, talk to people and relocate it on 7,000 acres of barren land available near Jatadhar, close to Gobindpur. “It is illegal to hand over fertile land to a multinational company. The Government has no right to destroy a well-developed agrarian economy for establishing the country’s biggest FDI”, he said. “While villagers are staging a peaceful agitation, use of police force to acquire land is not acceptable,” Agnivesh said.A four-member team of the Congress, led by the party’s chief spokesman Kailash Acharya, is also on a dharna at Dhinkia protesting forcible land  acquisition. Leaders of the CPI and the CPM and a BJP team are scheduled to tour the area next week.The district administration has made elaborate security arrangements with deployment of police force in the proposed plant site to prevent any untoward incident.  A protest meeting, called by Posco Pratirodh Sangram Samiti leader Abhaya Sahu, was attended by Agnivesh and  OPCC leaders.