Singur and Industrialization

In a "Letter to the Editor Mr. S. N. Datta of Katwa has been naïve enough to draw the conclusion that the Supreme Court ruling that “the government as a sovereign power can acquire land for public purpose" should set at rest the vexed Singur issue (Letter: SC judgment should set at rest….23 Sep).

He has not noticed that the West Bengal Government acquired the land at Singur not for “public purpose” but, on the one hand, to gift it to the Tatas under a “secret” agreement to enable them to use it to profitable business and, on the other, to deprive the farmers of Singur of their land because they had voted for Trinamul Congress in the last election.

Now, one argument in favour of acquiring the multi-crop fertile land in Singur (on the strength of an archaic Imperialist British Act of more than 200 years old) is that West Bengal is in need of ‘Industrialization’, which seems to be the present-day catchword instead of the old-fashioned terms like ‘revolution’, ‘class-struggle’ and ‘building a class-less society’etc. that we had been hearing for the last seventy years. West Bengal was known as the most industrialized state before the Communists came to power. Then the CITU, the wrecking machine of the CPI(M) closed down sixty thousand factories in West Bengal to bring it to the present state. Now, if we want to talk about bringing West Bengal back to the same level of industrialization, we should either reopen the closed factories or acquire those to be run on a profitable basis. No one seems to be thinking on these lines.
One more point. It is argued that the Tata small-car factory will generate employment. This is an eye-wash. In the capital-intensive industry in its modernised factory, almost everything is done by automated machines, and the generation of employment opportunity is very limited. Why couldn't the Tatas employ at least one member from each family of the farmers who lost their land??