Tata Motors will have no option but to pull the Nano car project out of West Bengal following Mamata Banerjee’s insistence that the 300 acres allocated be returned
KOLKATA: Tata Motors will have no option but to pull the Nano car project out of West Bengal following Mamata Banerjee’s insistence that the 300 acres allocated for the vendor cluster be returned to farmers.
The Trinamool chief on Friday evening walked out of a meeting with chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and said that she would settle for nothing less than the return of 300 acres acquired for ancillary units.
Tata Motors had indicated in a strongly-worded letter to the state government recently that the project could not be split in this fashion and that it would have to be commissioned on 1,000 acres. The car plant takes up 650 acres and needs constant supply of parts from the vendor cluster spread across 300 acres.
Tata Motors has already conveyed to its ancillary suppliers that a meeting will be held in Mumbai on Tuesday to take a final call on the location for the Nano. Indications are that Uttarakhand will be finalised, which brings a rather unfortunate end to the Singur chapter. The company and its suppliers stand to lose over Rs1,000 crore should the relocation happen, but most of them believe this is a better option than waiting in the wilderness.
And this looks almost certain after the crucial meeting between Mamata Banerjee and Bhattacharjee failed on Friday. She walked out after 90 minutes, rejecting the West Bengal government’s offer to provide 70 acres from the land acquired by its industrial development corporation for the project near the Nano plant.
Mamata also rejected the government’s offer of 50% additional compensation to all farmers who had given up their land, willingly or unwillingly, for the Nano plant.
State housing minister Gautam Deb accompanied Bhattacharjee while Trinamool MLA and the leader of the opposition Partho Chattopadhyay was with Mamata.
Sources in the know of the proceedings told DNA that Bhattacharjee tried to convince Mamata that if land in excess of the already offered 70 acres had to be returned, the entire project would be cancelled. But an adamant Mamata refused to accept this.
Rejecting the government’s offer, she walked out of the meeting venue and didn’t even answer media queries. She later told reporters at her residence that it was not possible for her to accept the state government’s offer to return 70 acres.
“In the last meeting in the presence of West Bengal governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi, it was agreed that maximum land would be returned from within the project area. I think it is a gentleman’s agreement and the state government should abide by it,” she said.
HC stays disclosure of Bengal-Tata pact
The Calcutta high court on Friday stayed, till further orders, the disclosure of the full text of the agreement between Tata Motors and West Bengal government on the Singur project. Justice Dipankar Dutta stayed the disclosure of the full text of the agreement while hearing a writ petition filed by Tata Motors.
Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee had been demanding the public disclosure of the agreement. In fact, the state government partially agreed to this point and had already displayed a summary of the agreement at the website of West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation (WBIDC).
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