The Presidential Consent
“There was still a glimmer of home. Now that too has been extinguished,” Md. Abdul, member of an “unwilling” family of farmers who lost land in Singur told Outlook. He was reacting to today’s verdict by the Calcutta High Court on a case in which Tata Motors challenged the Bengal government’s move to pass legislature that enabled the latter to re-acquire the land which the company had taken on lease in Singur to construct its small car factory during the time of the Left regime. To recap history, the then Bengal government gave 997 acres of land to Tata Motors at the time of Bengal’s big industrialization drive initiated by former CM Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee between 2000 and 2006 to set up the Nano plant. There were those who parted with their land and accepted the compensation paid by the government. They were called the “willing farmers.”