M S Tata Steel Ltd

Down in Dhenkanal, specifically in Mathakaragola, is where you’ll find M S Tata Steel Ltd. Suvransu Sekhar Rout is the name on the records here. Orissa can be a tough place to work during the peak of summer, the heat just sits on everything. We operate in a way that fits the local pace. It’s mostly about managing the steel supplies and making sure the trucks are loaded properly for their long trips. The roads out here aren't always the best, so we deal with a lot of logistics headaches. We have a small crew and most of us live nearby, so we walk or bike in. There’s a lot of dust because of the nature of the material we handle. It gets in your hair and on your clothes by the end of the shift. We aren’t using any high-tech gadgets to track things; a lot of it is done by hand in big ledgers. It feels more real that way. People around the village know us as the place where the big trucks turn around. We try to keep things quiet but steel is heavy and loud. If the power goes out, which happens, we just sit outside under the tree and wait it out. It's honest work and we don’t pretend it’s anything other than a tough, gritty job in a small town. We’ve been part of this landscape for quite a while now.