Steel company manager held for torturing tribals

Police said on April 28, Rameshwar Steel’s factory manager Dinesh Gupta and security guard Remaul Kujur forced the victims to sit on burning iron plates for more than half-an-hour after they pleaded innocence. Eye-witnesses said the youths were also forced to stand bare feet on the plates.

While SP (Raigarh) P.S. Thakur claimed that neither the the two victims nor factory workers informed the police, reports suggest that their complaints were not entertained initially.

“They didn’t even go to the hospital despite serious physical burns”, he says.

Reports say the youths had reported the matter to local police at Gharghora police station but their complaint was not entertained. It was only a day after Chief Minister Raman Singh’s gram-swaraj (rural campaign) started in the district that the issue received government attention.

Now the SP says: “Police has arrested the manager and guard on charges of torture and atrocities against tribals.

This incident comes barely a week after four security guards of a leading industrial group — Jindals — were accused of killing a villager.

In this case, says the Raigarh SP “four persons have been arrested on the charges of murder.”

For past two months, tension had already been building in Raigarh town against Jindals with villagers opposing the company’s Rs 2000-crore expansion plant. Reports say the security officials of the company deployed near the boundaries of Jindal’s steel plant, had opened fire on the villagers from close range. One person died and three others were injured.

Raigarh, a pre-dominantly tribal district bordering Orissa and Jharkhand, has come-up as an important steel and power hub after the formation of the state. Of the Rs 10,000 crore new industrial investments in the state, more than half is expected to be in Raigarh alone.