The most read English daily of Calcutta, The Telegraph, today, the 20th Sept’08, published a letter of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, written to the editor Abheek Sarkar, in the front page, on the situation of Singur in the wake of imminent pull out by Tata Motors from Nano Project.
According to him, the Nandigram decision was significantly mistaken but the Singur project with Tatas is basically sound. West Bengal badly needs industries, new employment and income earning opportunities. Tatas, with the ancillary enterprises would help in that greatly and also encourage a new image of West Bengal as being no longer hostile to industrial development.
Addressing the Tatas concern for the location of the factory, Amartya Sen said that unfortunately the location (nearness to Calcutta) not only well suited to Tatas for their project but the land was fertile for agriculture too. He was not worried for the loss of agricultural land, which according to him was relatively small but he shared the loss of land, howsoever small, to owners who were not willing to part with it.
However on the part of West Bengal government, he made a strong case for offering a higher price originally, since with the Tatas there, the land price should have been offered and paid much higher initially.
However he agreed that the new compensation package now offered (combined with rehabilitation, employment and other facilities), was a good compromise and much more reasonable.
He said in the letter that the Tatas have made it clear to move out in the event they are getting less land than they are (already) given. Maharastra, Uttaranchal, Karnataka, among other states seem to be ready with alternative and much better offers.
He further said that there is good reason to believe that Tatas are already in the process of relocating the plant unless there is fairly immediate breakthrough (which seems unlikely to him). With the departure of Tatas from Singur, there will be a huge fall in land prices in and around the project area apart from loss of job opportunities to the local population. According to him he was not sure how much the protesting leadership thought of these issues.
He emphasized that should the Tatas leave Singur, it will be a huge economic set back for Bengal as the general image across India would be that the single minded street politics in Bengal would make it nearly impossible to base any new economic move in the state.
He feels that the romantic street thought of prosperity grounded on agriculture only, would fade out over time under the influence of realism (that no country ever achieved prosperity based on agriculture alone). But, he sadly observed in the letter, “At this moment realism seems distant dream.”
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