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Journalism of Courage
Once there were factories with tall chimneys emitting large plumes of smoke. Once there was cement, sugar, paper, boards, asbestos sheets, chemicals, vanaspati (hydrogenated vegetable oil) and soap produced from these plants. Once there were 10,000 workers on company rolls.
“In our childhood, we rarely heard Dadi-Nani, Raja-Rani aur Chandamama ki kahani (grandmother, king-and-queen and moon uncle tales). Instead, we were told about how there was this big company here that had many factories employing thousands of people,” says Kamlesh Kumar Singh, a local journalist from Dehri-on-Sone, the town in Bihar’s Rohtas district that housed the massive industrial complex known as Dalmianagar.
The 45-year-old’s father, Ajab Narayan Singh, worked as a supervisor in the steel foundry of Rohtas Industries Limited (RIL), which, along with its three associate companies — Ashoka Cement, Dehri Rohtas Light Railway (DRLR) and Parshva Mining & Trading — directly employed about 10,000 persons and another 5,000 on an off-roll or temporary basis.
“Today, Bihar has berozgari (unemployment) and palayan (migration), with our youth going to other states in search of work. Those days, we had people not just from within Bihar, but even Ballia, Deoria, Mau, Ghazipur, Azamgarh, Jaunpur, Varanasi, Chandauli, Allahabad (now Prayagraj) and Kaushambi (all in eastern Uttar Pradesh) and places like Hoshiarpur (Punjab) and Una (Himachal Pradesh) coming to work in Dalmianagar,” recalls Shyam Narayan Prasad Singh, 81, a former foreman at the Murli Hill quarries that supplied limestone to RIL’s cement plant.
That was a different Bihar. The belching chimneys have gone completely silent. What remains in Dalmianagar are ruins that tell the story of a Rust Belt — the ultimate symbol of Bihar’s deindustrialisation.
Industry breeds industry
RIL, promoted by the Marwari entrepreneur Ramkrishna Dalmia, jointly with his brother Jaidayal and son-in-law Shanti Prasad Jain, started in March 1933 as Rohtas Sugar Limited.
While the sugar mill came up by the end of 1933, the site — located just next to the Dehri-on-Sone station on the Grand Chord section of the Eastern Railway — was also deemed suitable for cement and paper plants that got commissioned in March 1938 and April 1939, respectively.
The Kaimur range hills adjoining Dehri-on-Sone had extensive limestone deposits as well as bamboo forests. The paper factory used both bamboo and bagasse, the dry pulpy residue from cane crushing and extraction of juice in the sugar mill, as fibre material.
It didn’t stop there.
Every industry begot another. Between 1939 and 1950, RIL set up plants to manufacture caustic soda, bleaching powder, chlorine, hydrochloric and sulphuric acid. A major portion of these chemicals went as raw material for digestion and bleaching of pulp in the paper factory. The hydrogen gas generated during chlorine production was used in a vanaspati unit established in 1944. ‘Hanuman’ vanaspati from RIL soon became a household brand.
In 1943-44, an asbestos cement plant was set up to make plain and corrugated sheets. The cement was sourced from the factory next door, with the asbestos fibres used to reinforce the sheets being imported.
By the early 1950s, RIL also had factories for producing coated boards and vulcanised fibre from paper, in addition to toilet and washing soap (using vegetable oil and caustic soda from the chemical plant), table salt, dry distemper paint, cardboard boxes and playing cards (under the brand names ‘D-J’ and ‘Ashok’), pipes and poles (for underground sewage and electric transmission), and plywood.
A Special Economic Zone
Dalmianagar, as the sprawling factory town spread over some 2,000 acres was formally called from February 1940, perfectly fitted the description of an SEZ or a Special Economic Zone in current parlance. It was an exemplar of industrial capitalism, a parallel Jamshedpur.
The self-contained township had a 12-megawatt power house; a 1,800-feet-long electric ropeway connecting the sugar mill to a canal jetty and carrying cane in trolley loads; a central workshop equipped with a foundry and fabrication unit to manufacture castings, spare parts, components and complete machinery (including for the asbestos cement and vanaspati plants); and a ‘Dalmia-Jain Industrial Research Laboratories’.
On top of that were the 4,300 or so quarters for employees, a 60-bed hospital with free dispensary, a primary school and an English high school, recreation centres (a ‘Rohtas Club’ and a ‘Bengali Club’), and a Lakshmi Narayan, Hanuman and Digambar Jain temple.
Dalmianagar, moreover, had its own railway. The 67.5-km-long DRLR line from Dehri-on-Sone to Tiura Pipradih moved wagonloads of limestone (from RIL’s quarries), bamboo and sugar cane to the factory head.
This narrow-gauge railway also ran two passenger trains, daily to and fro. DRLR apart, RIL also had five dedicated tracks in the main Dehri-on-Sone railway station to bring in coal, gypsum, pulp and other raw materials and transport finished products from its plants. There was also a captive airstrip at Suara, roughly 10 km from Dalmianagar.
In the early 1960s, RIL produced around 20% of India’s total paper and boards. The company was the first in the country to undertake the manufacture of coated boards and vulcanised fibre sheets, besides a range of special machine-glazed, duplex, triplex, ticket, match, poster and tissue papers. The cement factory was India’s largest at a single location; so was the sugar mill.
RIL being a product of its time was also signified by Subhas Chandra Bose visiting Dalmianagar in May 1938, three months after he was elected as the president of the Indian National Congress at its Haripura session. Rajendra Prasad, independent India’s first President, inaugurated its paper plant in April 1939.
A township winds down
All that is history.
RIL and its three associate companies were officially shut down on September 9, 1984.
A part of that had to do with labour troubles, from strikes and go-slow agitations, compounded by trade union rivalry. Prime Minister Narendra Modi suggested as much during an election rally in Arrah on November 2 this year, where he blamed the “lal jhanda gang (labour unions)”, together with the previous Congress and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) “Jungle Raj” governments, for destroying one of “Asia’s sabse bada (biggest) industrial area”.
However, a former RIL finance department official pinned the responsibility mainly on the management: “The company grew under Ramkrishna Dalmia and Shanti Prasad Jain, who used to come regularly and stay in Dalmianagar. The promoters after them did not take active interest.”
There was no major investment in capacity expansion or modernisation after the installation of a third cement kiln and two special paper-production machines in 1956-57.
The writing was on the wall well before the closure of the factories and the company filing a winding-up petition before the Patna High Court in 1984. During the pendency of the petition, RIL’s workmen moved the Supreme Court, which issued notices to the Bihar and Union governments. On October 24, 1989, it passed an order directing the state government to appoint a senior Indian Administrative Service officer “with appropriate commercial background” as Rehabilitation Commissioner.
The Commissioner was able to restart operations in four of the units — cement, asbestos, vanaspati and the central workshop — with an infusion of funds totalling Rs 40 crore by the Bihar government. But after running for nearly four years till 1994 and continuing to make losses, the units had to be shut again.
On October 18, 1995, the Apex court ordered the resumption of winding-up proceedings in the Patna High Court. The Rehabilitation Commissioner was asked to hand over the company’s assets to the Official Liquidator attached to the High Court with effect from January 1, 1995.
‘The dead never return’
Much water has flown down the Sone river since.
“Every politician and party, whether in power or in Opposition, has promised to restore the glory of Dalmianagar in election after election. But the people here have got used to disappointment to the point of losing hope,” notes journalist Kamlesh Kumar Singh.
Jitendra Kumar Pandey, 73, who worked as a railway carriage fitter at DRLR from 1980 to 1984, expresses that cynicism: “Murda aadmi kabhi jeevit nahi ho sakta (a dead man can never come back to life)”.
RIL’s real assets have been its 2,000 acres of land. That included 231-odd acres of factory land and 238 acres of township colony and housing premises. The balance comprised 200 acres of small plots, a 502-acre Bank village farm at Akorhi Gola, only 7 km from Dalmianagar (it had mango orchards and sugar cane plantations), the 80-acre Suara airfield land and another 750 acres belonging both to RIL and DRLR.
Of the total 2,000 acres, over half has already been disposed of in sale auctions conducted by the Official Liquidator. In 2007, the Railways acquired 219.5 acres of RIL’s factory land for Rs 140 crore. The Suara airstrip and Bank farm lands were sold for Rs 17 crore and Rs 18 crore to the Bihar Industrial Area Development Authority (BIARA) and the Varanasi-based JVL Agro Industries Ltd respectively, in 2011. The individual parcels over 200 acres too have been sold.
For the people of Dehri-Dalmianagar though, the deals are of little consequence.
In November 2008, Lalu Prasad, the then Railway Minister and RJD leader, laid the foundation for a high-axle bogie and coupler manufacturing factory on the 219.5 acres that was acquired. The project made no progress thereafter.
In 2019, the Modi government announced the building of a wagon periodic overhauling workshop on the same site, with a completion period of 24 months.
“None of these have seen the light of day. Where can you get 219.5 acres at one place, free of litigation, next to a railway station and the Grand Trunk Road, and with water from the Sone river and canal system? What more does a factory require?,” asks Devesh Kumar Singh, 34, whose father Shambhu Prasad was a senior accounts manager at RIL.
According to him, the Railways paid Rs 140 crore for the land, but earned Rs 94 crore by selling scrap from the plant and machinery in the closed RIL units. The net outgo was hardly much for the land, whose market value has appreciated from Rs 50,000 per decimal (0.01 acres) before 2005 to Rs 6.5 lakh now.
The 219.5 acres, where the cement, paper and other factories once stood, today only has wild grass, with cattle and horses grazing on them. The same goes for the 80-acre Suara land that has only a small wool spinning and finishing plant.
“They (BIARA) should have used this land to construct a full-fledged airport, which would generate far more economic activity and jobs,” points out Amit Raj, 42, from Akorhi Gola village.
The Indian Express similarly saw a solitary 12 tonnes-per-hour rice mill at the 502-acre Bank farm that was supposed to have a Mega Food Park — for which the foundation stone was laid by then Union Food Processing Industries Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal in August 2015.
But JVL Agro itself went into liquidation in August 2020. Most of its land has passed on to one Nifra Developers Pvt. Ltd, owned by former Bharatiya Janata Party MP Gopal Narayan Singh. The latter is planning to start a new “agro-based food park” plus an “agriculture and sports university” on this land.
The Dalmianagar factory complex still has a functioning girls higher secondary school, the temples and dilapidated employees’ quarters. What its people, however, want to see is dark smoke billowing from tall chimneys again.
