JOB HAUNT: The workforce at DPC's plant is down from 12,000 to below 200

Sunil Bendre begins his day driving his Tempo Trax to the state transport bus stand in Guhagar at 4.30 a.m. Then begins his 12-hour odyssey of ferrying passengers to and fro. It's illegal as his vehicle isn't a public transport but Bendre has no choice. He has to pay back a loan of Rs 2 lakh he took from a bank to buy the vehicle three years ago or risk losing his mortgaged house. Life hasn't always been this hard in Maharashtra's coastal town of Guhagar, some 10 km from the site of bankrupt energy giant Enron's India subsidiary, the Dabhol Power Company's (DPC) 740 MW project. Sunil's brother Rajesh and his father Dattatreya lost their jobs with DPC six months ago. He's now left to run the five-member family using the vehicle he once hired out to the plant.

Five years after the first bulldozers had set to work in the area, the country's single largest foreign investment-which first spelled protests-began to usher in a boomtime as it radically altered lifestyles and drove up incomes in the constellation of a dozen towns and villages. "People who drank well water and country liquor all their lives began consuming only mineral water and branded liquor,'' says local hotelier Arun Oak.

SOURED DREAMS: Empty booths, closed shops and an idle transport fleet signify the slide in the local economy

While DPC employed only a few hundred locals, the bulk of the workforce were contract labourers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. However thousands of locals found employment in ancillary industries that orbited around a workforce of nearly 12,000 plant employees. STD booths, barber shops, dhabas, lodges made their money servicing the plant's employees. The tiny local post office remitted monthly money orders worth Rs 35 lakh. Activity reached a fever pitch when construction on the 1,444 MW Phase II of the plant began. Hundreds of youth in the district, like Sunil Bendre, hired out their fleet of newly purchased utility vehicles to the company for Rs 20,000 a month. The number of lodges in Guhagar quadrupled to eight. Hundreds of residents added rooms to their homes to accommodate company personnel at Rs 3,000-8,000 a month, rates at which you could hire a flat in suburban Mumbai. Dhaba-owner Shamkant Khatu pooled in Rs 25 lakh to construct the town's swankiest restaurant.

Today, the roads are lined with dusty Sumos and Mahindras. Many have been sold by those who couldn't afford to pay their monthly installments. Most shops are shuttered down as are the STD booths which once ran round the clock. The hotels are empty. It is feared that Enron's likely global collapse will compound the economic woes that began when the DPC plant spun out its last few watts in May.

The bilingual "No Job Vacancies" signboard stands ominously outside the company. Workers hoping for reopening of the plant are now surrendering their id cards and can be seen filing out of the white barbed wire ringed compound for the last time. The plant's six giant red and white striped funnels soar out emptily into the sky. Left behind, in the plant spread over a few thousand hectares with a breath taking view of the Arabian Sea, are a handful of employees including some 200 security personnel.

-Sandeep Unnithan in Dabhol