Reaping the rage

In Singur, the tide of public anger has turned against the Trinamool

- RABI BANERJEE

AROUND 40KM FROM Kolkata, and a short distance off the national highway that connects West Bengal’s capital to Delhi, lies a village once known for its green fields—Singur. The once-abundant fields are mostly fallow now. Also gone are the remains of a factory which was supposed to roll out the world’s cheapest car, the Tata Nano.

It was the protests against the Nano project that put Singur on India’s political map. More than a decade ago, around 2,000 farmers who were forced to give up fertile land started an agitation that not only led to Tata abandoning the half-built factory and shifting the project to Gujarat, but also ended the decades-old left-front rule in West Bengal. It was on the back of the agitation in Singur, and a similar movement in Nandigram, that Mamata Banerjee and the Trinamool Congress rode to power in 2011.

In Singur, though, memories of that famous struggle have faded. Mahadeb Manna, a farmer who had celebrated the day Mamata was sworn in, is now disillusioned. “The leaders have let us down,” he says. “We have nowhere to go now. What shall I do with these patches of barren land?”

It is sundown and Manna, 55, is grazing his cattle on a field overrun by wild bushes and trees. The three acres he was forced to give up for the factory has been restored to him, but it is of no use. Around 1,000 acres in Singur were acquired for the project, but by the time farmers got all of it back after a long legal battle, the fields had become uncultivable. The compensation that farmers received from the state government—a few lakh rupees each—was hardly adequate. “The land could never be restored to how it was,” says Mahadeb. “I am now looking to sell it. But it is difficult to find buyers, as the land can only be used for industrial purposes now.”