As TATA Steel celebrates its $7.8 billion Corus acquisition, the city of its birth — Jamshedpur — is stuck in a tug of war between a local politician and the company over municipal jurisdiction, stunting the 99-year-old industrial hub’s development plan.

Raghubar Das, the BJP MLA from Jamshedpur East and Urban Development Minister in Jharkhand’s NDA government that fell last month, has been lobbying for a municipal corporation in the city, founded by Jamshedji Tata in 1907. A 64 sq km area that currently falls in the Tata’s administrative zone will come under an elected urban local body if the plan goes through — a sore point that is expected to snowball into a full-scale territorial battle.

The tussle began earlier this year when Das, a former employee with Tata Steel and whose name still figures on the company payroll as being on “long leave”, mooted the idea for a municipal corporation to access funds under the Centre’s Jawarharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM).

Tata Steel, which pays a nominal rent for the land leased by the government, is unhappy because it is the steel giant’s subsidiary Jamshedpur Utility and Services Company (JUSCO) that has been providing water, street lighting and road maintenance services to the Jamshedpur Notified Area.

And it is not just the Tatas who are seeing the political intervention into the city’s future as a threat. After the state urban development ministry floated the plan for a civic body in Jamshedpur in June this year, a citizens’ forum moved the Ranchi High Court with a public interest litigation, asking the court to reject the proposal as it did not have the state Cabinet’s backing. The court’s subsequent directive for a review of the plan and a change of guard in capital Ranchi has given the Tatas a reprieve, but there remains one big question: Why does the city need a corporation when the JNNURM alternatively allows an industrial township committee in places where municipal corporations don’t exist? There is, however, no easy answer for Tata Steel.

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