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Tatas to improve civic facilities in Steel City

Nilanjan Dey

KOLKATA, Oct. 26

TOWN management in Jamshedpur, the traditional Tata bastion, is set to turn over a new leaf. The Tata group, which spends around Rs 100 crore annually on the Steel City, is seeking to outsource expertise for a number of services, especially healthcare an d water management.

The Tatas are responsible for looking after a large part of Jamshedpur, now home to about seven lakh people. The services rendered by the group include those related to health, water supply and disposal, power and housing.

For starters, the group has proposed to outsource management solutions for Tata Main Hospital, which was started in 1907 and is now a 740-bed facility. While details of the proposal are not known at this juncture, the broad idea is to work out a suitable agreement with an independent authority.

According to Mr A.N. Singh, Deputy MD (Corporate Services), Tata Steel, the group has been in talks with a few leading players in the managed healthcare industry. The final tie-up could take any shape -- the options range from a simple management contrac t to a complete term-bound handover.

Tata Main Hospital has essentially been an `industrial hospital' over the years. In Jamshedpur, it is in the leading medical facility among the others that are partly assisted by the Tatas -- the Meherbai Tata Memorial Hospital, the Ardeshir Dalal Memori al Hospital and the Jamshedpur Eye Hospital.

The expenditure on town services is not balanced by adequate revenue inflows. ``In an ideal situation, however, each service should support itself'', Mr Singh told Business Line.

This implies that in future the group will be keen on ensuring that even water management in Jamshedpur becomes an enduring affair, managed possibly with the help of a competent agency. At the moment, it is responsible for the entire system, from collect ing river water and treatment to supply and discharge.

Supplying clean water is a key issue for the group and there are efforts to augment the existing supply system, said Mr S.M. Hussain, GM (Town Services), Tata Steel. ``Jamshedpur is probably the only city of its kind where people can drink off the tap. T he per capital availability of water is also quite high,'' he said.

Adding value to the existing water service, however, will require more funds. And one of the ways of generating resources is to ask users to pay more. Is there a case for increasing rates to match better services? While there are no straight answers, it is acknowledged that one needs to move over to a higher rate regime over a period of time. Alternatively, it is also pointed out that ``inefficiencies can not be built into water costs''.

In education, too, there is need to expand the existing infrastructure. Despite the existence of a number of schools (some of them run by organisations such as the Catholic Church), there is scope for new schools in the Steel City, it is felt.

Among the group's recent projects is a 9.5-km riverside drive along the city's periphery. This `ring road', which will cost around Rs 20 crore to build, will be a bye-pass of sorts, near the Kharkai and Subarnarekha rivers that border the city in one dir ection.

According to Mr A. Naresh, Chief of Town Division at Tata Engineering, over 8,000 houses and more than 100 km of roads have to be sustained by the group (in the Telco region). The company is linked to Tata Steel in many ways, and its expansion plans for the Tata Engineering area cannot be seen in exclusion to the former's agenda.