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Four decades ago, a number of established industries decided to move out of West Bengal to other locations because of labour unrest. That signalled the flight of capital from the State undeservedly stamping it with the opprobrium of a risk-prone investment region. As the State slipped from the investment radar screen, West Bengal’s loss was arguably western and southern India’s gain. From the tone of Mr Ratan Tata’s warning on Friday about Singur and the Nano car project, it appears that history may repeat itself if Tata Motors, like others before it, decides that the State is a bad bet. Once again, West Bengal and its people, with high levels of skill but low levels of employment outside a declining agriculture, stand to lose. Unlike in the past, however, the rest of the country does not stand to gain.

Some aspects of the case are pretty clear. If Tata Motors does pull out of Singur some other State will benefit, because the company is determined to go through with its plans even if the relocation costs it dear. But that gain will come with its own price, a price that the nation will have to pay and for which New Delhi must take full responsibility. Fuelling the opposition’s recalcitrance is not just local disaffection, however genuine it may be, but a widespread discontent among farmers whose property is being sought for industrial activity. For the farmer, it is not just land but loss of a way of life itself, however unproductive and deprived it may be. Historically, the transformation of rural land to industrial sites has provoked a spectrum of responses, evident in India today across States. The irony is that the most violent opposition to land acquisition, as in Singur, is most palpable in backward States or regions that desperately need investment, such as Orissa, eastern and southern Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Chattisgarh. Systemic failure of agricultural policy, abysmally outdated land acquisition and rehabilitation laws have fed the simmering and sometimes violent discontent as in Singur, and in Orissa against POSCO. In the event, one cannot rule out more such clashes in backward regions where disaffected groups may find the Tata pullout, if it happens, an inspiration. Investors/promoters may also read a pullout as a flight of capital to more safe, prosperous States— thus exacerbating regional inequalities.

Singur may not be the last such episode of its kind; similar ones are being threatened by promoters exhausted by the fury of the helpless and the ineptitude of the policymaker, who still refuses to clear the thicket of arcane legislations unfavourable to the farmer-landowner. If Singur loses, India loses.

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