 "The erstwhile site for Tata Motors' Nano car factory, symbol of the industrialisation bug that had once bitten West Bengal and then led to one of the most violent of agitations against land acquisition")
The rusty metal gates, thick foliage and deserted structure could well have been props from a horror flick but this is no reel, it’s real. It’s the erstwhile site for Tata Motors’ Nano car factory, symbol of the industrialisation bug that had once bitten West Bengal and then led to one of the most violent of agitations against land acquisition.
The imagery could also be a metaphor. It’s almost four years since the Mamata Banerjee government moved the Supreme Court against an order of the high court (HC) in the state capital against the Singur Bill. That had sought to vest the 1,000-acre lot to house the Nano mother plant and its ancillary units, with the objective of returning land to farmers who had not wanted to part with it. The hearing is still pending.
Election dates have been announced and Singur and the Tata factory, as symbols of industrialisation, are important issues.
“If Mamata Banerjee really wanted to help the people of Singur, she could have gone for a settlement with the farmers and got another company. This case has been languishing for four years. She knows this Bill is flawed,” says Udayan Das, convenor, Singur Shilpa Bachao Committee.
The background for the Bill is somewhat like this. The Singur Land Rehabilitation and Development Bill was passed by the state’s Legislative Assembly on June 14, 2011, soon after the Mamata government came to power. Shortly after, Tata Motors moved the HC. A single judge’s order had declared the Act valid but a larger Bench set aside the former’s order and struck down the Act, primarily as it was held to be in conflict with the Land Acquisition Act of 1894. Subsequently, the state filed an appeal in the Supreme Court in 2012.
The Left Front, which had stayed away from Singur since the fiasco, has made a comeback and with gusto. Around mid-January, prominent Left leaders — former Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, former industry minister Nirupam Sen, Politburo member Biman Bose, Opposition leader in the Legislative Assembly Surjya Kanta Mishra — flagged off a padayatra from Singur. It covered seven South Bengal districts and ended at Salboni in West Midnapore.
Singur was deliberately chosen as the starting point. Rekindling the hope for industrialisation, Bhattacharjee said at the meeting that only the Left could set up a new factory at Singur. The Left Front, for a change, appears to have decided not to make Singur a cakewalk for the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC). The party has pitted CPI(M) state secretariat member Rabin Deb against the TMC’s Rabindranath Bhattacharya. A three-time MLA, the latter had won in 2011 by about 100,000 votes.
Deb on Thursday hit the campaign trail in a Nano and said the Left would bring that factory to Singur if it won.
If industrialisation is the Left’s theme, Mamata’s development agenda is the ruling party’s slogan this time. “In the past five years, the kind of development work Didi (Mamata) has done is unparalleled,” says Manik Das, one of the 2,200 ‘unwilling farmers’ of Singur and now a zila parishad member.
He doesn’t believe that Mamata recently said her job in Singur was done and the court case could take another 50 years. The message was lost in translation, according to him, especially since she has been handing out 16 kg of rice at Rs 2 a kg and cash of Rs 2,000 a month to the ‘unwilling’ farmer families for the past three-and-a-half years.
Mahadeb Das, another ‘unwilling’ farmer, also engaged in “party work”, rattles more benefits. Around 500 youths from Singur have been absorbed as civic volunteers, he says.
Indeed. In the last five years, one of the achievements as listed by the state government is engaging 135,900 civic volunteers and 3,351 village police volunteers. Recently, the Cabinet approved a health insurance scheme called Swasthya Sathi, that would cover civic police volunteers among eight million beneficiaries and cost the government Rs 1,000 crore. The group insurance scheme would provide coverage of Rs 1.5-5 lakh, without any cap on family size.
‘Willing’ farmer Sheikh Taher Ali Mondal is a picture of contrast. “Our family — three brothers and two sisters — had 10 bighas. I got only Rs 2.7 lakh (for the land) that was spent on marrying off my daughter,” he says. At 71, he is making ends meet by tilling other people’s land. Mondal is one of the 11,000 farmers who gave consent for the Nano factory.
All farmers are equal; in Singur, some farmers are more equal than others.
