Anita Kothari doesn’t mind her husband, Ranjit, being photographed at his tattered tobacco shop. ‘‘Let the country know how this happened to him,’’ says the angry woman. At least Ranjit makes a living of sorts today.‘‘He roamed the streets for months when the Batras threw him out of work without paying him for eight months,’’ says the angry Anita as her quiet, saddened husband, a former staff at Rajinder Steels, watches. ‘‘We had no food to eat, no future.’’The 400 former employees of the now-desolate Rs 1,000 crore Rajinder Steels factory are lost souls today, once proud industrial workers who must scratch a living from the same desolate lives they hoped to leave behind. One must trawl the 12 villages around Siltara to find men like Kothari who have painfully gone back to old trades. There’s Kirtan Sahu, father of four, and a fitter who knew a ‘‘bit of stitching’’. So he works as a tailor today. Shiv Kumar Yadav, once a driver with the Rajinder Steels, is now a farm worker.At the plant itself, only the towering factory sheds, hostel and canteen complex tell you there was once a buzzing steel unit here. The forest seems to be reclaiming the steel plant, notorious now only for the presence of snakes. ‘‘Even our dog is afraid of going inside after a recent encounter with a snake,’’ says Sant Ram Mirza, one of six private security guards left at the complex.Chattisgarh state Principal Secretary P. Raghavan confirms the rumours doing rounds in the villages that a leading industrial group wants to takeover and restart the Rajinder Steels— that is, if the terms for the white elephant are favourable. The semi-literate villagers of Siltara are not unaware of why their dreams died young. ‘‘It was a thoroughly dishonest venture,’’ sighs Raj Kumar, a former welder. ‘‘Even when the plant shut frequently because of a funds crunch and kept us unpaid, the top executives travelled in luxury cars and drew fat salaries.’’ At the Mandhar village where the Kotharis live, mention of Batra makes people restive. The village sarpanch says Batra must be punished. Before that though, he must be found.
