Ranchi, April 16: Industrial and mining centres of Jharkhand have registered abysmally low population growth rates in the last decade, mirroring largescale migration of residents that has taken place due to a drastic fall in employment opportunities.

While a number of PSUs have shut down or announced a hiring freeze, the politically turbulent state of Jharkhand has failed to attract investments given the unfavourable business climate, heightened by recurring incidents of Left wing terror.

Jamshedpur, Bokaro, Dhanbad, Ramgarh, once thriving industrial areas with a steady workforce, have taken the biggest hit, as revealed in the recently released provisional data of Census 2011.

Dhanbad finds itself at the bottom of the growth rate chart with a figure of 11.91 per cent, 10 per cent less than the state’s average of 22.34 per cent. Another coal mining hub, Ramgarh, is looking at a 13.06 per cent growth rate followed by East Singhbhum’s (Jamshedpur) 15.53 per cent and Bokaro’s 15.99 per cent.

Dhanbad deputy commissioner Sunil Kumar Burnwal, who is also census commissioner of Jharkhand, said there has been massive migration from mining and industrial hubs over the past decade or so.

“Dhanbad’s adjoining unit of Fertiliser Corporation of India (FCI) at Sindri has closed down. In East Singhbhum, few employees of Hindustan Copper Ltd (HCL) are left. Many coal mines and copper mines closed operations, while there have been no new entrants in mining or any other industrial activity,” he said, pretty much summing up the state of affairs.

If the Dhanbad-Bokaro region was effected by the closure of PSUs, a number of refactories shut shop in Ramgarh. The closure of a number of iron-ore and limestone mines, most of them illegal anyway, meant that the workforce of the Singhbhum region moved on to Orissa and Bengal.

K. K. Bhagat, a professor in the rural development department of Xavier Institute of Social Service (XISS), said of late “push factors” had gone up in the state’s industrial and mining hubs, citing poor work conditions as one of the other contributing factors of the exodus.

“The condition of labourers/employees in these places were never very good except for top and middle-rung employees. There have been reports of contractual labourers being subjected to paltry payments and other kinds of exploitation,” he explained.

P. Sahu, a former head of postgraduate department of geography in Ranchi University, said the changing population dynamics in industrial hubs was also suggestive of retrenchment by companies on a down-sizing spree.

“Moreover, no new industrial or mining activity has started in the recent past,” he added.

The plight of Sindri Fertiliser Factory is an apt example. With the plant closing down in 2003, the population of the town dropped by 20,000. According to Sewa Singh, president of All India VSS Employees Welfare Association of Sindri, there were around 8,000 employees at the factory when it shut down.

“Now, only 1,200 out of the 6,000 quarters of Sindri township are occupied, while others are either lying vacant or have been illegally taken over,” said the former PRO at the factory.

Professor N.K. Ambastha of P.K. Roy Memorial College of Dhanbad said besides shutting down of industries — also those at Kumardubi and Nirsa — no new employment opportunities were created at Bharat Coking Coal Ltd, the largest PSU of Dhanbad district due to a hiring freeze.

Burnwal, who has also served in East Singhbhum, agreed and pointed out that number of employees at, say, Bokaro steel plant of SAIL, collieries owned by Coal India Limited (CIL) subsidiaries as well as the mighty Tata Steel had shrunk drastically over the last decade.

Tata Steel in Jamshedpur had a workforce of around 70,000 15 years back. Today, the employee strength is around 38,000 because of technical upgrades and outsourcing.

Apart from migration, Prabal Sen of XLRI in Jamshedpur explained, better awareness about family planning measures may have also played a role in bringing down the population growth rate.

“But, migration of labourers from Jharkhand is a fact of life. Apart from Bihar, UP, Punjab and Haryana, 90 per cent of labourers in the tea gardens of north Bengal and Assam are from East Singhbhum and various other parts the state,” said the professor of economics and chairperson of XLRI’s entrepreneurship development centre.

He is seconded by Ambastha and ISM-Dhanbad professor Pramod Pathak. Both agreed that in addition to dwindling employment opportunities, rising literacy levels was also a contributory factor in Dhanbad.

Industrial growth remained stagnant, too. Industries department records show that in the last 10 years, the state signed MoUs worth over Rs 3,00,000 crore with over 75 prospective investors in steel, power and other sectors — most of these during chief minister Arjun Munda’s earlier stint between 2003 and 2005.

But, big ticket proposals of ArcelorMittal, JSW Steels, Essar Steels, Hindalco, CESC, among others, were yet to make any visible progress on ground.