QUESTION: Essar Group

question / pregunta: 

I recently read a report in The Daily Express (trinidadexpress.com, page 28 in the News section, 2-15-08) about a protest in Trinidad featuring 6 people from The Claxton Bay Fishermen Associationan Claxton Bay, during which the police were called. Land is being surveyed for the construction of a port to be used by Essar Steel. I want to know what Essar has done/is doing in other countries and whether or not there have been campigns against them. Thanks!

Answers


Answer posted by:
jim miller

This could actually be a very huge project - to research the history of this company, the people involved in it, and the reactions of countries and localities where it has set up operations. For a quick start, or introduction, there are a number of web searches you might find useful.

In Google, "Essar Steel" opposition site:gov.in gets 5 hits; "Essar group" site:gov.in gets 57. "Essar Steel" site:ac.in (86 hits) or "Essar group" site:ac.in (94 hits), get many sites to do with university affiliations, or people who are involved with the company. US government searches "Essar group" site:gov (4 hits) and especially "Essar steel" site:gov (82 hits) may be useful, because they report incidents such as Iron Ore in May 2007 Essar Steel Holdings Limited’s iron ore beneficiation plant ....attacked National Mineral Development Corporation’s rail line ... , which reports: "In India, Maoist rebels targeted railway property and mine infrastructure. The rebels damaged the water pumping station at Essar Steel Holdings Limited’s iron ore beneficiation plant and attacked National Mineral Development Corporation’s rail line from the Bailadila mines—both in Chhattisgarh State."

You can try many individual countries in a Google search, for example: "Essar steel" project site:cn (26 hits), "Essar steel" environmental site:ca (29 hits), "Essar group" site:za (17 hits), "Essar group" rebels site:uk (40 hits), etc.

The Edgar database gets 10 hits for the search: essar in the company name, and might well help you find U.S. subsidiaries or people involved with Essar.
In Edgar full-text search, click "Advanced search" and get 14 hits for the "company name" search: essar

At most public libraries you can try commercial databases that have some full text online. Masterfile Premier gets 31 hits for the search: essar steel and 20 for essar group; Business Source Premier gets 48 and 33. Most public libraries will also have newspaper databases, with a lot of full text. For example, Proquest Newspapers gets 8 hits in New York Times alone, for the "citation and document text" search: essar and steel. In large academic libraries, you can get access to even bigger databases, such as Factiva, which gets 30 hits in past 2 years for the full text search: "essar steel" and tribal, and 352 hits for just the headline search: "essar steel" in the past 1 year.