By IANS
Bhubaneswar : Tension gripped a village in Orissa's Jagatsinghpur district Sunday after two groups of residents clashed over South Korean steel major Posco's proposed project in the region.
The clash erupted Saturday night when over a dozen activists of the Rashtriya Yuba Sangathana and the Nabanirman Samiti, two organisations spearheading an agitation against the project, met some of their supporters at Nuagaon, some 100 km from state capital Bhubaneswar.
Nuagaon is one of the villages to be affected by the project, to come up under the largest foreign direct investment in India.
Activists alleged that two supporters of the project led a mob and attacked them.
The clash left a number of activists injured, though district administration sources said nobody was hospitalised and no police complaint was filed either.
A series of clashes over the project have been witnessed in recent weeks.
On May 16, protesting villagers in Nuagaon had detained two Posco officials for two hours and released them only after they promised not to visit the village again.
It was the second time the protesters took company officials hostage. Hundreds of protesters had May 11 held two officials of the company hostage for over 10 hours at Patana village, some 100 km from here.
The duo were released after a written undertaking that they will not enter the village again.
Posco, one of the world's biggest steel makers, signed a deal with the state government in June 2005 to set up the plant near the port town of Paradeep in the coastal district of Jagatsinghpur by 2016.
There has been no significant progress on the project since then, due to local opposition.
More than 20,000 people from about 15 nearby villages including Dhinkia, Gada Kujanga and Nuagaon are opposing the project saying it will displace them and ruin their betel leaf farming.
Posco says the plant would affect only 500 families but it would create thousands of jobs.