Making Bengal pay for scrapped Singur project 'insult to injury': CPI(ML) Liberation

Kolkata: The CPI(ML) Liberation on Tuesday said that making the people of West Bengal pay over Rs 765 crore plus interest for Tata Motors’ abandoned small car project at Singur is 'a cruel insult to a profound injury'.

An arbitral tribunal has awarded Tata Motors a compensation of Rs 765.68 crore for losses incurred after its Nano car project at Singur was stalled after protests by the then opposition Trinamool Congress.

'The Singur project had to be called off because of the local people's resistance to the acquisition of fertile multi-crop land. No project can be imposed on people in the face of local opposition,' CPI(ML) Liberation general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya said.

'Nothing could be more absurd, arbitrary and unjust for the people of West Bengal who are now expected to bear an added burden for an abandoned project and wasted agricultural land,' he said.

Tata Motors had to shift its plant to produce small car Nano from Singur to Sanand in Gujarat in October 2008 due to a land row. Tatas, by then, had already put over Rs 1,000 crore in Singur.

The idea of the Nano car 'turned out to be flawed' and the project failed even in Gujarat, Bhattacharya said.

'Making the people of West Bengal now pay after nearly two decades for a flawed idea and an aborted and abandoned project built on forcibly destroyed cultivation and livelihood of thousands of land-and-livelihood-losing households amounts to adding a cruel insult to a profound injury,' the Left leader said in a statement.

He said Singur is just one instance of 'popular opposition' to a project where land was acquired 'forcibly'.

In recent years, similar cases have been witnessed in Niyamgiri and Kalinganagar in Odisha and the Sterlite project in Tamil Nadu.

In a regulatory filing, the auto major informed BSE on Monday that a three-member Arbitral Tribunal has ruled that the company is entitled to recover from the respondent WBIDC a sum of Rs 765.78 crore with an 11 per cent per annum interest from September 1, 2016, till actual recovery thereof.