Burnpur is the captive township around the IISCO Steel Plant, about five kilometres south of central Asansol. The plant itself is closed to casual visitors, but the township is unusual enough to be worth a walk through — wide streets, century-old company bungalows, the IISCO clubs, and Nehru Park on the Damodar river.
It is the closest you will get in West Bengal to the planned mill towns of South Yorkshire or the Ruhr. Visitors are usually here for business; for everyone else, an hour driving or being driven through Burnpur is a quietly interesting glimpse of industrial India.