A day before Singur under Hooghly Parliamentary constituency goes to poll in the fifth phase of the Lok Sabha elections, farmers talked to DNA on Sunday and vented their ire against the TMC-led government saying that part of the land where Tata Nano project was proposed to come up had been handed over to them but it was far from being cultivable.
Bharat Chandra Das, the 73-year-old who, along with his brother used to own eight bighas or about 13,000 sq mt land has been given only one and a half bighas of land so far. "I don't want the 16 kg rice and Rs 2000 which the state government gives me every month. From the land which I own I used to earn at least Rs 20,000 every month. We were well off and married off nine girls of the family earning from that land. The little land which I have received so far from the Tata plot is not cultivable at all. Certain part of the land has concrete beneath it which is hampering the cultivation," he told DNA on Sunday. He said that the rest of the land could not be given to him because it had not been demarcated yet. "The land which I have got is very low in yield because of no irrigation facility," he added.
On August 31, 2016, Supreme Court ruled that the acquisition of land at Singur by the then Left Front government was illegal and that the 997.11 acres land acquired was to be returned to the erstwhile land owners. The Singur issue had been one of the major forces to help Mamata Banerjee ascend to power in Bengal in 2011. She had lauded the decision of the apex court and declared that the land would be returned in an arable condition to farmers.
The story of 61-year-old Dwariknath Ghosh, a resident of Beraberi Purbapara at Singur was equally sad. He owned two bighas and five cottahs of land within the proposed Tata Nano manufacturing unit campus and had not got his land back because it had not been identified yet. The farmer now sells rolls and noodles. "I have put up this fast food shop because I could not let my family starve to death because the government has not yet returned my land," he said.
The delay in physical handing over of land has caused a lot of resentment among people which has resulted in a steady rise in the organisational strength of BJP in the area. "The state government had, because of its own political gain, pushed out the Tata project out of the state and Gujarat gained from what Bengal lost. Now, there is neither a factory or farmland and it has become a sea of weeds. People have realised how they had been duped by Mamata and after the BJP comes to power in 2021 in Bengal, we will demand the Tata project to be back in Bengal. It will create thousands of employment ," said Monotosh Maiti, BJP general secretary of Chanditala Block in the area.
The concrete pipes which had been laid as a part of the drainage system of the Tata project, have also been dug up and kept along the brick road in the area.
TMC MLA Becharam Manna from the adjoining Haripal Assembly conceded that it would take some time to remove the debris from the area. "There had been several feet of concrete pile up at the site. It will definitely take some time to remove those," he told DNA. He however, denied that there was any growth in BJP strength. "We carry out door-to-door campaign and have a personal connect with the people here. There is no presence of BJP here and we will give the biggest winning margin from Haripal to Dr Ratna De (Nag), the TMC candidate from Hooghly constituency," he said.
