Geographical Location

Longitude

Latitutude

Altitude

Chotanagpur Plateau             South Bihar, India.

86.12 deg.  East

22.47 deg.  North

159 m above mean sea level  ( at Tatanagar )

933 m above mean sea level ( at Dalma )

The road to Sakchi began in Pittsburgh...

At the turn of the century, Jamshetji Tata went to Pittsburgh and asked geologist Charles Page Perin to help him find the site to build his dream - India's first steel plant. The search for a site rich in iron, coal, limestone and water began in April 1904 in today's Madhya Pradesh. The intrepid hunters were    C M Weld, Dorab Tata and Shapurji Saklatvala. It took nearly three years of painstaking prospecting acros vast stretches of inhospitable terrain for Dame Fortune to smile. And smile she did, near a village called Sakchi ( now part of Jamshedpur ), on the densely forested stretches of the Chotanagpur plateau. 

The hunt was over. But a greater adventure was yet to begin.The task was awesome. Building a steel plant was a titanic enterprise. And so was the Steel City. But Jamshetji's blue print was clear. It looked beyond a mere row of workers' hutments and insisted upon installing all the comforts and conveniences a city could provide. When the first spade struck the soil, the seeds were sown. India's Steel City took root and sprang to life.

The Kalimati Railway station, today's Tatanagar.

The turning point in the long and arduous search for the right site came when a letter from an unassuming geologist P N Bose (left) sent the explorers to Mayurbhanj region near today's Jamshedpur.

The discovery of the Kharkai and Subarnarekha confluence ended the search for the perfect site. Atlast, along with iron, coal and limestone, there was water available aplenty. A black trap dike crossed the river diagonally, making an almost perfect pick-up weir.

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This site has been designed and developed at Clear Pixel by Avishek Chakravarty and Arun Nair .