Serial offender
The massacre at Thoothukudi marks a major escalation in the long-festering confrontation that Sterlite has had with the local community ever since it entered the town in 1994. The fact that the Vedanta Group, the parent to Sterlite Copper which runs the Thoothukudi plant, specialises in the extraction of natural resources gives this nexus the ominous ring of cronyism masquerading as capitalism. In hindsight, the Balco acquisition in 2001, at what was even then widely recognised as a “good buy” at a throwaway price, was the first stepping stone to Sterlite’s runaway success as a mega corporation. The list excludes Balco’s 270 megawatt captive power plant, which itself would have been worth several hundred crores at the very least and was sold to Sterlite as part of Balco’s assets. A senior metallurgist at a leading Indian corporate told Frontline that Anil Agarwal’s claim, in a recent interview to a leading financial daily, that the Thoothukudi plant is “a zero discharge” facility is “simply impossible”.
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