The whirring of heavy earthmoving machinery dismantling the old and making way for the new was at work, punctuating the silence hanging heavy over the vintage steel mill which had come up here as the first steel plant in the state in the midst of World War I in 1918.
This steel works and the city which gos with it, was envisioned by Sir Rajendra Nath Mookerjee, an industrial genius of his times, and were quietly built long before industrial or urban policy entered the political discourse of the country.
Today, the sprawling acres where Sir Rajendra Nath or Sir Rajen as he was affectionately called by contemporaries, built his huge steel-making complex, will be home to the largest greenfield expansion plans in steel making in eastern India, boasting of the latest and perhaps the largest blast furnace in the world.
The old ‘silver’ of the vintage plant will be replaced by new plants, bringing hope to what has become the “Rustland of the east – the Durgapur-Asansol-Burnpur belt”.
Tied to this may well be Bengal’s long stymied plans to be an automobile hub given the fact that high quality automobile grade steel will be cast here in the years to come. India’s electric vehicle market is expected to cross 17 million units by 2030, according to projections and electric vehicle factories in India are as yet few and far between. Experts argue that this one steel mill may well attract many EV and spare parts makers to come looking for opportunities are right.
Born in colonial Bengal, Mookerjee emerged at a time when Indian entrepreneurs faced formidable barriers in sectors dominated by British firms. To circumvent the barriers, the young engineer from Shibpur BE College joined hands with an Englishman Thomas Acquin Martin to establish Martin & Company in the 1890s. After Martin’s death, Mookerjee became the sole partner, later acquiring Burn Company and merging the two into the industrial giant Martin & Burn.
As his construction business expanded, Mookerjee became increasingly aware of the strategic vulnerability of relying on imported iron and steel. To address this, the intrepid entrepreneur founded the Indian Iron and Steel Company (IISCO) at Burnpur, a new venture which was nothing but an audacious bet on India’s growth story in the Twentieth century.
Within decades, so highly regarded was Burnpur’s steel-making expertise that Japan’s Nippon Steel sent trainees there to learn modern industrial practices to this steel making hub, about 4 hours drive to the west from Kolkata. Its shares traded not only on Bombay and Calcutta Stock Exchanges but also on the London Stock Exchange, where it was considered a blue-chip buy.
During the inter-war years and for several decades afterwards IISCO stood at the heart of India’s industrial growth, eventually becoming part of the Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL).
“More than a century after IISCO’s founding, Burnpur remains central to the region’s industrial ambitions,” Surajit Mishra, Director-in-Charge of IISCO Steel Plant and Durgapur Steel Plant told UNI.
“Along with Durgapur Steel Plant’s brownfield expansion and modernisation, we are committing Rs 47,000 crore out of Rs 1 lakh crore that SAIL has decided to spend on capex in Bengal alone,” Mishra pointed out.
The expansion is designed to produce hot-rolled coils, sheets and plates, creating opportunities for downstream industries ranging from automobile manufacturing and machine building to steel fabrication.
“Potentially the automobile grade steel will be he most important debutant from IISCO. If and when it comes, if Bengal can play its cards well, new EV makers may well look at Bengal as a possible hub for their vehicle factories … after all it also has ports which can bring in other items which are part of the EV manufacturing chain from East Asia,” said Rachna Ahuja, chairperson of Ingar Electronics, which produces spares for EVs in India. And East Asia.
There is a certain historical symmetry in that prospect, as more than 100 years ago, Sir Rajen Mookerjee argued that industrial development required bold investments in steel, transport and infrastructure. Today, as Bengal once again seeks an economic revival, the state is turning back to institutions he helped create.
Mookerjee had helped shape the physical landscape of eastern India, way beyond the steel and iron which his works at Burnpur and neighbouring Kulti produced. Martin & Burn was involved in some of the subcontinent’s most iconic projects, including the Victoria Memorial, Dakshineswar Temple, Belur Math, the Tipu Sultan Mosque, Garden Reach Shipbuilders, Shahid Minar and the Hooghly Dockyard.
The Victoria Memorial proved a defining moment. Initially contracted only to construct the foundations, Martin & Co. impressed the colonial authorities sufficiently to be entrusted with the entire project, an achievement that contributed significantly to Mookerjee being awarded a knighthood.
Yet perhaps no structure better symbolises his legacy than Howrah Bridge and the expansion of Howrah Station, engineering feats that became synonymous with Kolkata’s rise as a commercial metropolis.
Mookerjee’s vision extended beyond steel and construction. Frustrated by the limitations of the colonial railway system, he pioneered an affordable private narrow-gauge network known as Martin Rail, linking smaller towns across Bengal, Bihar and parts of northern India. Though largely vanished today, traces of that network survive as reminders of a forgotten era of indigenous infrastructure building.
After Mookerjee’s death in 1936, the industrial mantle passed to his son, Sir Biren Mookerjee, whose statue was recently installed by Mishra, who feels, “We owe a lot the industrial genius of the man”.
Among other things, Sir Biren pioneered tapping global industrial finance in independent India. In 1953, he signed a US$31.5 million loan agreement with the World Bank to support Burnpur’s expansion, the first time the institution extended financing to a private-sector industrial project. A second agreement followed in 1956, though nearly three-quarters of the expansion and modernisation costs for IISCO were met through internal cash generation, reflecting the strength of the enterprise.
The furnaces of Burnpur may be more modern, and the ownership may have shifted from private hands to the public sector, but the underlying idea remains unmistakably Mookerjee’s. Prosperity can be forged, quite literally, in steel.