This might sound like a slightly rephrased old saying about Bengal's thought leadership in its heyday. But take a close look at recent developments, and you will realise that many aspects of West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's approach to the Singur problem should be emulated by other chief ministers in the country.
For the uninitiated, the Singur problem arises from three factors: the CPI (M)-led West Bengal government's rather belated realisation that it must create conditions conducive to more industrial investment in the state, its success in attracting the Tatas to set up its small car factory there and the Singur farmers' natural reluctance to give up their land, on which the factory is to be set up.
Singur is an area that is largely used for the cultivation of paddy and farmers there are not well off. Many of them have been wooed away by the tertiary sector and a large number of them have moved over to the suburbs of Kolkata and meet the metro's labour needs.
Yet, the farmer's pride in what he cultivates (never mind that his productivity is poor and his income from agriculture cannot help him keep body and soul together) is intact. And when the state wants to acquire even an inch of that land, he resents that and for good reasons.
Anywhere in the world, the farmer's response will be the same. In India, this is slightly different. With quite a few political parties bereft of new ideas and movements to latch on to for their survival in business (if you have an annual average 8 per cent growth rate over the last four years, most political parties and trade unions would indeed grope for
causes they can espouse), the Singur problem was fertile ground for opposition political parties in West Bengal to regroup and mobilise their forces against the ruling Left Front.
Even the Congress unit in the state came out in protest against the acquisition of land for the Tata factory, along with the Trinamool Congress.
But Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has managed to come out with an attractive compensation package that should please even the most die-hard opponent of the Singur project. The Tatas have agreed to provide one job in the small car factory to every member of the family that loses its land.
In addition, farmers owning the land will get compensation at a rate that is 52 per cent more than the prevailing market price. Measure it by any yardstick, this is an attractive compensation package. The Tatas have also agreed to set up a shopping complex outside the factory, where too farmers will get an opportunity to get jobs. Instead of flocking to
Kolkata and its suburbs for menial jobs, the Singur farmers can hope to get jobs in their own village.
There are many other resettlement and rehabilitation issues that are bound to come up following the land acquisition in Singur. The Tatas and the West Bengal government have to respond to those issues as well. But the beginning has been good and the political opposition to such projects is bound to lose steam after this.
It is a good beginning because the Tata small car project is one of the first big industrial investments that the Left Front government has managed to woo since its sixth consecutive return to Writers' Building early this year. The compensation packages worked out now will set a healthy precedent that subsequent projects will be obliged to honour.
Rapid industrial growth brings in its wake issues of resettlement or rehabilitation of farmers who lose their land as a result. The demand for compensation rises as farmers dependent on land have over the years suffered from stagnation, low productivity and inadequate returns.
No state government can ignore this ground reality before deciding on rapid industrialisation. It is naive to argue, like some chief ministers have done, that the land that is being acquired for setting up a factory or a special economic zone was barren or was not being used for productive agriculture or double-cropping.
Indian farmers (and they account for more than 60 per cent of the country's population) have long felt that they have been left out of the party that the rest of India has been enjoying. It is reasonable to believe that India's manufacturing sector can grow in a sustained and inclusive way only if it manages to co-opt the farmers displaced from their land-through adequate compensation and the creation of tertiary jobs arising out of their manufacturing activities.
It seems Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has recognised this almost intuitively and has forced the Tatas to fork out more than what even the markets would have expected them to for meeting the land cost. His goal is to make Bengal's new industrialisation more sustainable and inclusive.
The question is: Will the Poscos and Naveen Patnaiks, Reliances and Hoodas or the Kamal Naths of this country realise this and make India's transformation into an industrial powerhouse less painful for 60 per cent of its population?
