Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
island in the estuary of Koltata's Hooghly River, but this did not materialise during the time
of communist rule and was cancelled by the Banerjee government.) Violence continued in
the Nandigram area throughout 2007, when armed cadres of the CPI(M) tried to reestablish
their control by ousting rival political groups and Naxalite extremists who had moved in
during the troubles. Houses and shops were burned and ransacked, and fear was spread by
patrolling motorbike convoys carrying red flags. Instead of trying to rein in his party's act-
ivists, Bhattacharjee endorsed what they had done, saying they were 'justified'. Referring
to earlier violence by the opposing groups, he said that 'the opposition has been paid back
heard during the previous three decades, but no one expected such an open and top-level
endorsement of lawlessness. (Bhattacharjee later publicly regretted having made the 'same
coin' remark.)
15
The dispute over Tata's Nano factory at Singur was not nearly as violent as the battle-
ground at Nandigram, but it did far more economic and social damage because nothing has
happened on the site since 2008 when Tata departed. Originally, the Nano was to have been
made in Uttarakhand, a state northeast of Delhi, in the foothills of the Himalayas, where
Tata Motors already had a plant. It was switched after Bhattacharjee invited Ratan Tata
to Bengal and matched Uttarakhand's special hill-state investment incentives that included
low-cost land, low interest financial loans and substantial tax waivers. At Tata's request,
the 90-year agreement, comprising four pages of text and eleven pages of financial spread-
sheets, was kept confidential, though the text briefly appeared on the government's website
in response to a court order till Tata appealed for its removal. It is now back on the website
following the change of government.
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Bhattacharjee's officials proposed six sites, including one at Kharagpur, a town famous
for its Indian Institute of Technology (where Telcon, a Tata company manufacturing heavy
earth-moving equipment, successfully became the anchor investor in 2010 in a 1,200-acre
industrial park). Ratan Tata wanted the Nano plant to be more accessible for staff living in
Kolkata than Kharagpur would be, 120 km from the capital. He chose Singur, just 45 km
away, which also provided high visibility for the Nano brand name on the busy National
Highway 2 from Kolkata to Delhi. He refused an offer from Bhattacharjee to move else-
where when the opposition began and the site was hit by monsoon flooding.
The drawback, which Tata ignored or did not fully realize, was that the site, divided into
3,500 small plots, mostly less than an acre, was on well-irrigated agricultural land that pro-
duced two good rice crops a year plus potato and other vegetables. This was used by op-
ponents as an argument against the project, though the site had already been designated as
an industrial park. Three industrial buildings (a cold store and factories for glass bottles
and condoms) were already being built and had to be closed and transferred when the state
government commandeered the land for Tata.
