ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the fate of the villagers whose land was requisitioned for the Plant and the Township. It deals with their experience of, and responses to, displacement and with the new inequalities that emerged. The chapter is concerned with their disenchantment with agriculture and initial fear of industrial employment. The idea of ‘progress’, of having embraced modernity and left rural darkness behind them, of belonging to a more ‘educated’ and ‘civilised’ world, has a powerful hold on the minds of Bhilai Steel Plant workers. Workers were being thrown into the foundations to make them bear the weight of such massive erections, into the furnaces to make them function. People were also frightened for other reasons – frightened of the huge monster-like earth-moving machinery they would watch from afar with fascinated awe but never approach. People typically joined matrilateral or affinal relatives outside the acquisition area.
