The Hindu Business Line : Bengal and industrialisation

On Monday, the Trinamul Congress leader, Ms Mamata Banerjee, said that “Progress does not mean that the (West Bengal) Government will grab fertile land from poor farmers in the name of industry. Farmers cannot be the victim of the CPM’s arrogance and egotism”. With reference to Singur, where the Nano plant is coming up, she also said that about 300 acres of land taken for the project must be returned to the farmers. The remaining 600 acres could be utilis ed by the company to build its plant.

There are three specific issues here, each of which is important if one is to understand where West Bengal’s industrial policy stands today and the results of the recent panchayat elections which went against the Left Front Government.

The first is the broad subject of West Bengal and industrialisation, Ms Banerjee having made it clear elsewhere that her party is not opposed to this form of development.

This is, perhaps, the best statement the Trinamul leader could have made in recent times because what West Bengal needs today is a reassertion on the part of its leaders that without industrial development, the State will continue to wallow in the backwaters of national economic development.

Allocation of land

But how does one go about it, which leads one to the next issue mentioned by Ms Banerjee, namely, the allocation of land for industry.

Normally, no leader in his senses would arbitrarily allocate fertile farmland for industrial purposes because what it would ultimately mean would be mere substitution of one form of economic growth by another, resulting in no overall gain for the States’s economy as a whole.

Indeed, this has not been the case in West Bengal, as far as Singur and Nandigram are concerned. It has been more of a locational issue with industry asking for land which would yield a higher final return which, in most cases, has clashed with the interests of agriculture.

In other words, the land earmarked for certain industrial projects has been the same where good agricultural returns have materialised over the years, leading to a direct conflict between the two interests.

This is what is meant by the Trinamul stand that the Government should not grab fertile land from the poor to set up industries.

Using brute force

In the case of Singur, the Left Front Government has admitted that some force was used to acquire the land because of the “shortage” of time the Government was faced with in getting the project for the State, specially in view of the competition offered by other regions.

Singur can, therefore, be seen more as an exception rather than the rule, and the Opposition parties in West Bengal should look at it in this way in the interests of healthy, constructive politics. Nandigram was different. There was no reason why land should have been acquired in the way it was initially, which provided a lot of fodder for the Trinamul charge of using brute force with the poor peasantry.

This is where the third element of Ms Banerjee’s diatribe comes in, namely, the “arrogance and egotism” on display when the land was acquired at Nandigram. One suspects that a big reason for the way rural Bengal voted was the behaviour of lumpen elements who went about terrorising ordinary, innocent people in an effort to force them to hand over their land. Media hype did the rest.

Clearly, all this has nothing to do with the need to industrialise West Bengal, which must be speeded up in the next five years if the State is to grow in the future.

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