Land filling proves to be a bonanza for Singur businessmen

Work at the Singur site of the Tata Motors Rs 1 lakh car project has created an unlikely set of beneficiaries: goods transport vehicle operators and landfill material supply contractors.

The car factory site, located 50km west of Kolkata on National Highway 2, was a low-lying plot of land that required dumping of huge quantities of sand and other landfill materials.

According to sources in the Calcutta Goods Transporters Association, the low-lying, marshy land was being filled in with 100 to 120 truckloads of sand and other construction and landfill material daily.

The transporters were working in co-ordination with contractors and small businessmen holding panchayat and government licenses to dredge sand from riverbeds and arid, uncultivable zones.

These were almost all micro and small businesses, working for a large contractor.

"If you travel along the highway, you will a see long line of trucks waiting at the site to dump materials", said the transporter. The river sand dredging licenses were issued to deepen river channels and increase the carrying capacity of the streams while the arid plots were dug out to create water bodies and reservoirs under various government welfare schemes, said the source.

"Dredging of rivebeds for sand is a regular feature and panchayats may be selling more licences, firstly to enhance their revenue, and also in response to greater demand in the market for good quality for filling in land and construction uses", said top sources in the West Bengal government's panchayat department.

To be fair, the dumping has been going on for some time now but the efforts were not enough to prevent complete inundation of the factory site in mid-September.

Besides sand, stone chips and aggregates were being shipped to the site, where two large sheds and several smaller sheds were now in different stages of completion. Shipment of large quantities of bricks was next on the agenda as work was due to speeded up with the end of the rainy session.

A formal drainage system would be built to drain out water from the site.

The plot had on its western side a small stream called the Julkia which was a mere trickle in most months but prone to flooding during monsoons, but was hardly 10 metres wide.

The Tata Motors factory area covered 330 acres while parts of the 600 acre attached zone for ancillary units had already been handed over to ancillary units whose boards had been put up in the area.

The Kolkata-Bardhaman railway chord line and Chandanpur station were close to the site, which had a frontage of nearly 1km on the four-laned NH2 linking Kolkata to New Delhi.

A contractor at the site said besides the car assembly line, related facilities like test tracks and parking lots were to come up as well.

The site was surrounded by a guard wall to keep out displaced families, some of whom were still refusing to accept the acquisition of their land by the government for the project, and had its own service road.