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Tata Motors wins Singur land case against WB govt: Here are case details

Tata Motors secured an arbitral award of Rs 766 crore, with 11 per cent interest in the Singur plant case against the West Bengal government

singur, tata nano plant area

In 2016, the Supreme Court stated that the land acquisition in Singur was

Rimjhim Singh New Delhi

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Tata Motors on Monday won the Singur automobile manufacturing facility case against West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation (WBIDC). Tata will recover a sum of Rs 766 crore with interest. Tata Motors had plans to manufacture its Tata Nano cars at the facility.

The company, in a statement, said, "The pending arbitral proceedings before a three-member arbitral tribunal has now been finally disposed of by a unanimous award in favour of Tata Motors Ltd, whereby the claimant has been held to be entitled to recover from the respondent (WBIDC) a sum of Rs 765.78 crore with interest thereon at 11 per cent per annum from September 1, 2016, till actual recovery thereof. The claimant has also been held to be entitled to recover from the respondent a sum of Rs 1 crore towards the cost of the proceedings."
 

What is the Singur land case?

In 2006, the then chief minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, announced that Tata would be given almost 1,000 acres to set up a plant to manufacture the Nano.

However, efforts to take control of the land in Singur in Hooghly district ran into trouble. The then Opposition leader and Trinamool Congress Chief Mamata Banerjee protested against it and termed it as "forceful land acquisition".

Local people and small parties, such as the Socialist Unity Centre of India (Communist) [SUCI(C)] and Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) [CPI(ML)], protested against the bid to take over the "fertile" cropland. However, the acquisition was completed, and work began on building the Nano plant.

Why did clashes happen in 2007?

In 2007, Mamata Banerjee started a movement against the Left Front government, and TMC cadres clashed with police and the administration in the Singur core industry area. She started a 26-day hunger strike, which later gained the support of several environmental activists.

In January 2008, Tata Motors announced that they would launch the Nano at the New Delhi auto expo. Following this, the Calcutta High Court upheld the land allocation to the company.

However, Mamata Banerjee continued her agitation, and attempts by then-state governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi to establish peace between Mamata and the government did not succeed.

Following this, Tata Motors decided to pull the production of the Nano out of West Bengal and made its announcement on October 3, 2008. On the invitation of Narendra Modi, then Chief Minister of Gujarat, the company took the plant to Sanand in the Ahmedabad district. It took Tata Motors 14 months to build a new factory in Sanand, Gujarat, compared with 28 months for the Singur factory.

What followed next?

After Tata Motors left Singur, questions were raised that the ruling had forcibly acquired the 997 acres of multi-crop land required for the car factory, which was made under the colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894. Under the law, the state could take over privately held land for public purposes but not for developing private businesses. The illegality of the acquisition has been substantially conceded by the Kolkata High Court.

There were several protests against the state government as people were left homeless after the government acquired the land. However, landless peasants and sharecroppers, especially those owing allegiance to the CPI(M), welcomed the factory. These count chiefly among the owners of bigger portions of the land, even as discrimination in the compensation has been alleged.

The state government imposed the prohibitory Section 144 of the Indian Penal Code for initially a month and then extended it indefinitely. The imposition has been declared illegal by the Kolkata High Court.

What was the court's judgment?

In 2016, the Supreme Court quashed the West Bengal government's acquisition of 997 acres of agricultural land for Tata Motors and ordered its return to 9,117 landowners. It stated that the land acquisition in Singur was "illegal".

On October 30, 2023, Tata Motors secured an arbitral award of Rs 766 crore, with 11 per cent interest in the Singur plant case. The three-member Arbitral Tribunal unanimously ruled in favour of Tata Motors, compensating them for losses related to the abandoned Nano car manufacturing facility in Singur.

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First Published: Nov 03 2023 | 1:54 PM IST

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