West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has said that the decision of the Tata Group to withdraw from the Singur project was a colossal one.
According to the lease agreement between Tata Motors and the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation, the lessor will have the option to terminate the lease if the land has not been used for three years or more, which will kick-in from October 2011. Tata Motors had pulled out of the Nano project in October 2008.
The Calcutta high court asked West Bengal government on Friday to explain land acquisition process for Tata Motors plant at Singur, a project that has set off a political storm.
There is a flicker of hope for Tata Motors' abandoned Singur site. A team from government-owned Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL) visited the place, along with state government officials, for a possible project with the West Bengal Power Development Corporation.
The Indian industry on Wednesday offered to play the peacemaker in the land row in West Bengal, parts of which have been witnessing violent protests by farmers against acquisition of land for industrial purposes.
Social activist Medha Patkar and Trinamool Congress chief Mamta Banerjee continued their hunger strike on Tuesday while TC threatened to launch a long-drawn movement against the Tatas' proposed car project on a farmland in Singur.
Tata Motors has more than doubled its investment plans for the small car project in Singur in West Bengal.
According to insiders, police 'have left no stone unturned in dissuading Mamata from conducting the Wednesday meeting.
The police, however, cited no reason for their arrest.
The resolution said the government should talk to the Tatas and return the lands of farmers who had not been willing to part with them and who had not availed of compensation.
A team of National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) on Friday held on-spot inquiries in Sandeshkhali to ascertain facts about alleged sexual abuse by some Trinamool Congress leaders even as fresh agitation rocked the trouble-torn village, where locals torched the property of accused Trinamool leaders and held demonstrations against the delay in arresting the main accused, Shahjahan Sheikh.
The automobile firm's response came in reply to an earlier specific query of the apex court asking it to make its stand clear over the allotted land in the wake of changed scenario as the company had already moved its car plant to Gujarat.
Tata Motors on Thursday clarified that it has no intention to back out of the Singur deal where it plans to set up a plant to manufacture the Rs100,000 car.
Having been outwitted by Trinamool Congress' Mamata Banerjee after she sent the Tata Nano car project packing from West Bengal by demanding that land be returned to unwilling farmers, the Communist Party of India-Marxist is getting ready to do a Singur on Banerjee.
The Tata Motors notice, dated June 18, which was pasted on the gate of its erstwhile Nano factory at Singur, was aimed at intimating that no Tata Motors official was based at the site and any unannounced visit should not be made at odd hours since the factory housed valuable items.
Farmers are gettong ready for another agitation.
West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee on Wednesday said he had called Tata Motors Chairman Ratan Tata and urged him to resume work at Singur.
Irked by constant intimidation of its workforce by agitating party workers, the company had yesterday evacuated the manpower from Singur. "There has been no improvement in the ground situation so far, hence the conditions are still not conducive for resuming work today," a Tata Motors spokesperson said. "We continue to assess the situation closely," he said.
The West Bengal government's new compensation package for 'unwilling' farmers in Singur, 40km from Kolkata, might have been praised by Tata Motors, but those involved in land transactions in the area find the offer inadequate.
West Bengal Governor M K Narayanan on Monday said he had thought that the Singur legislation did not require Presidential approval, three days after the Calcutta high court ruled it as constitutionally invalid and void.
In a setback to the Mamata Banerjee government, Calcutta High Court had ruled on June 23 that the Singur Land Rehabilitation and Development Act, 2011, introduced by her government to recover land leased to Tata Motors in Singur for its small car project was constitutionally invalid and void.
Tata Ryerson, a 50:50 joint venture between Tata Steel and US-based Ryerson Inc, is investing Rs 120 crore (Rs 1.2 billion) for the Tata Motors' small car project at Singur.
Work continued to be stalled at the Tata Motors small car plant in Singur on the ninth day of the Trinamool Congress' indefinite dharna as the management said conditions were not conducive for resuming work.
BJP IT department head Amit Malviya shared on Twitter what he said were the details of accidents under these ministers and added such 'worthies' are the ones demanding the resignation of the 'most qualified' railway minister the country has had in seven and half decades.
In a ruling which can have far-reaching consequences, the Supreme Court on Wednesday set aside the controversial acquisition of 997.11 acres of land in Singur in 2006 by the then Left Front government in West Bengal to set up Tata Motors' ambitious Nano car manufacturing plant.
'The TMC did not bother telling me, a sitting MLA for 20 years, why I was not being given a ticket.'
In power, Mamata Banerjee has tried to bury the ghost of the past, but it might still be work-in-progress. Big-ticket and eye-grabbing (in terms of investment size) projects are still few and far between, reports Ishita Ayan Dutt.
At the height of the agitation against Tata Motors and after, the decibel level at Singur has always been high. The coronavirus scare, however, appears to have tempered it. The lockdown has hit Singur's inhabitants hard in more ways than one, reports Ishita Ayan Dutt.
'Didi' became the real 'Dada' as she got past the post, on a wheelchair and a foot in cast, a souvenir from the Nandigram battle against former protege-turned-rival Suvendu Adhikari.
Those who have 'sold their souls to outsiders from Gujarat' are insulting the Nandigram movement by playing the communal card, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said on Tuesday, and rejected the claim that she was an outsider in Nandigram.
On Wednesday, Bengal's own daughter she firmly pitched herself as, was sworn in as the chief minister of the turbulent state for the third successive term amid raging fires of political violence and a rampaging pandemic.
At the scheduled start of hearing on the third day on Tuesday morning, Tata Motors Limited counsel Samaraditya Pal told the court of Justice Saumitra Pal that Kalyan Bandopadhyay, who appeared for the state government, had made personal attacks against him on a TV programme on Monday.
'Everyone wants to take a vaccine. The last time a camp was held, there were 1,000 people for 500 doses. People are waiting and returning disappointed. At times, it is creating problems. The demand is much more than the supply.' Ishita Ayan Dutt reports on how the West Bengal countryside is reacting to the vaccination drive.
However, a few defectors, who joined the BJP, got the better of their TMC rivals, including Suvendu Adhikari who emerged as a proverbial giant slayer, by defeating Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee albeit by a narrow margin.
They posed as tourists on being stopped by police, claimed the MPs of the Mamata Banerjee-led party.
The solution lies in asking the private sector to get its own land; indeed, some of the firms planning large retail footprints across the country are tying up with specialised realty firms for precisely this reason.
Amid demands for a separate state carved out of Bengal by some Bharatiya Janata Party leaders, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday asserted that she is ready to shed her own blood, if need be, to thwart attempts to divide the state.
The Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM), an umbrella body of over 40 farmers' unions, on Friday urged agriculturists and other people of West Bengal not to vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party in the upcoming elections.
The spectre of Singur and now its verdict is looming large on the future of many of Bengal's projects, especially the state government's industrial parks that are vacant. As many more episodes await, the question uppermost on everyone's minds is, how long will Singur haunt Bengal?
© 2026 Rediff.com - Investor Information - Advertise with us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy - Sitemap - Feedback - About us - Terms of use - Grievances