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Abandonment tag on Tatas
-The Telegraph

Tata Motors has “abandoned” the Singur project, according to the draft of a state government bill that seeks to take over the entire land leased out to the company and prospective vendors.

If the Singur Land Rehabilitation and Development Bill, 2011, gets passed in the Assembly without any changes to the draft, it will be a matter of official record that the project has “in fact been abandoned by the TML (Tata Motors Ltd) as announced by the TML and reiterated in their letters ….”

The Tatas declined comment today.

However, on October 3, 2008, while announcing the pullout, Ratan Tata had said: “Two years ago, I said if somebody puts a gun to my head, you would either have to remove the gun or pull the trigger. I would not move my head. I think Ms Banerjee pulled the trigger.... The reason we are leaving is the agitation by Mamata Banerjee.”

The draft of the bill, which the Mamata Banerjee government wants to table tomorrow though the Opposition has raised procedural questions, makes it clear that land will be returned only to those who have not collected compensation cheques.

The draft says that the land is being taken back by the government “with a view to returning such portion of land to the unwilling owners thereof, who have not accepted compensation and to utilise the balance portion in public interest and for the benefit of the state”.

This is the first time that a guideline has been laid down to identify the so-called “unwilling farmers” in Singur. This means those who had not collected cheques for reasons other than unwillingness, such as long absence from the area, can also get back plots of equivalent size.

On the flip side, those who picked up the cheques under alleged coercion from CPM cadres will not be eligible to reclaim plots.

The draft does not mention unwilling bargadars, sharecroppers who cultivate crops on land owned by others, but government sources said “some provision” would be made to ensure that they also received plots.

The draft has also laid down the process through which the Tatas can seek compensation. (See chart)

According to lawyer Arunava Ghosh, once the bill is passed, there will be no need to amend the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, to return the Singur land to its original owners. “This will be a new law to bypass the provisions of the Land Acquisition Act that does not allow the return of land to the owner of the land. But this is specific to Singur and cannot be applied in other cases,” Ghosh said.

In the Assembly today, Opposition leader Surjya Kanta Mishra raised questions about the government’s “haste” and added that several procedural norms were being flouted.

The lapses cited by the Opposition include the thin window of time between circulation and discussion of the bill, skipping the one-day adjournment after obituary references tomorrow and changing the sequence of the debate on the governor’s address. ( )

Governor queries

Governor M.K. Narayanan called state industries and parliamentary affairs minister Partha Chatterjee, law minister Malay Ghatak, state advocate-general Anindya Mitra, industries secretary Dipankar Mukherjee and senior law department officials to Raj Bhavan to clarify on several “legal and procedural queries” he had about the bill.

The meeting lasted nearly four hours. Sources said Narayanan possibly discussed with Chatterjee and the others the points raised by Mishra.

“The governor did not want a repeat of what happened with the ordinance that he had signed and which turned out to be unconstitutional since the House was in session,” a source said.

List of names

The draft runs into 280 pages but only five deal with the legislative points. The remaining 275 pages list the names of farmers who did not accept the cheques, the sizes of their plots, the mouzas where these are located and the compensation allocated.

Sources in the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation put the number of “unpaid awardees” at 2,800 and the collective size of their land at 347 acres.

A statement in the bill suggests that the state government can award plots of the same size to the “unpaid” persons if the land leased to Tata Motors is caught up in some bottleneck.

Of the 997.17 acres, 647 acres were leased out to the Tatas and the rest to vendors. The draft says that although letters of allotment had been issued to all the vendors recommended by Tata Motors, none of them had taken the land on lease.

It says the premium paid by the vendors would be refunded to them after deducting the rent arrears.

Law and order cited

The bill cites potential “law and order problems” as one of the reasons for taking back the Singur land, which offers a point of defence if the issue reaches the courts.

“Several owners of the land/farmers have protested against acquisition against their wishes and have not accepted any compensation and, on having realised that there is no scope of employment, have been clamouring for return of their land and staging agitation in that area, endangering safety and security of the area… serious law and order problems are likely to develop,” according to the draft.

The draft makes no reference to whether the returned land can be sold again. Land dealers in Singur said the owners would “make a killing” if they sold the land.

The plots were acquired at rates ranging from Rs 8 lakh to Rs 13 lakh per acre, depending on location and fertility. The same land can now fetch Rs 50-60 lakh an acre.

Owners’ concern

Dilip Samanta of Gopalnagar, who had refused to collect the cheques for his 14 bighas(4.6 acres) in Singur, said: “Our source of livelihood has disappeared ever since our land was acquired. It was a very fertile land yielding four crops a year. Let’s now see where we get the land and whether it is as productive as earlier.”

It is unlikely that the same physical plots that were acquired will be given back to the “unwilling farmers” whose land is scattered across five mouzas.

Another farmer, Tushar Ghosh, 35, who had over an acre in Singur, said he had accepted a cheque for Rs 12 lakh “under duress”.

“I had joined the anti- acquisition movement led by the Trinamul Congress and was arrested,” Ghosh said.

“But my family members became scared when the local CPM leaders started terrorising us and I was forced to collect my cheque. I consider myself unlucky as otherwise, I too would be getting my land back.”

The state government has decided to pay the WBIDC the Rs 137 crore it had doled out as compensation to those farmers who collected their cheques.