The article I mailed had a few words at the end cut off.
Sorry.
The full article is here under.
SR
Appearance and reality:Ratan is no Jamshed Tata by Prem Shankar Jha 17 Oct 08 (http://deccanherald.com/Content/Oct172008/editpage2008101695552.asp)
If Tatas are not the wounded victims that Ratan Tata has portrayed, Mamata is also not the villain as made out to be.
Ratan Tata claims that he has taken the decision to pull the Nano project out of West Bengal with great sadness. He has held one, single person responsible for his decision — Mamata Banerjee — who held a gun to his head and "pulled the trigger". Industry leaders have queued up behind him to predict a dire future for Bengal. "If it is difficult for the state to ensure security for someone like the Tatas," said R Seshasayee of Ashok Leyland, "it is easy to imagine what will happen to others".
There is, however, another side to this story. Had you been listening closely to Tata's press conference, you would have heard him say, "We believe compensation has been paid and that it is a fair compensation." Paid by whom? Not by Tatas. And that is the key to understanding why the company is so casually exiting West Bengal today. Tatas did not pay for the land. The Rs 131 crore of compensation paid to farmers and sharecroppers as of December 2006 was paid by the Bengal government. Tatas has taken the land from government on lease and the lease rent is a pittance.
Little stake in Bengal
In reality therefore Tatas have pulled out so quickly because they had very little at stake in Bengal. It is true that their investment in the Nano project runs at around Rs 1,500 crore. But the overwhelming proportion of this money has been spent on machinery — the hugely expensive robots that man the assembly lines, the tool and die, body and paint shops, in any car plant today. Tatas have been moving these out for some time.
They will also move out generators, computers, specialised cabling and all other moveable items of office and factory equipment. Their final loss will therefore be the flooring of their sheds, their investment on infrastructure and the actual cost of erection of the plant and installation of machines. This will not be a small sum, and it will be a dead loss, but one suspects that it will be a good deal less than what West Bengal sank into the acquisition of the land.
If Tatas are not quite the wounded victims that Ratan Tata has made them out to be, Mamata Bannerjee is not the villain she has been portrayed as being. On the contrary, if the Left and future governments, both in West Bengal and in New Delhi learn the right lessons from Singur, she may well turn out to be India's saviour. My eyes were opened to this possibility when I was shown Bengali TV coverage of how the land was actually acquired in 2006.
For the better part of twenty minutes I saw sticks in policemen's hands rising and falling with metronomic regularity to the accompaniment of sickening thwacks of wood meeting flesh. As the beating continued the policemen leant further and further forward: it was apparent that their prey were on the ground but still being beaten. I saw men in their sixties being led away with torn and bleeding head wounds, and weeping, bruised women being supported out of the villages by social workers and Trinamool cadres. There were endless reels of footage, but I could not take any more.
Very little of this footage had appeared in the national channels. And the media had made it out that it was the Trinamool that had blocked the roads, bottled up the villagers and 'forced' the police to resort to 'lathi charges.' No one bothered to ask just how the villagers' consent had been obtained. No one asked why 400 or so of them were demanding their land back.
Are the blood and tears of the poor a necessary price of 'development?' Was there no way of making the landholders and sharecroppers in Singur beneficiaries of 'development' instead of its victims? There was, but Tatas never even considered it and took refuge in the legal plea that they were not involved in the acquisition of the land.
To see how easy it would have been to co-opt the landowners and sharecroppers, one needs to ask just one counterfactual question: what would have happened if Tatas had decided to set aside just one quarter of one per cent of their annual sales revenue and distributed it as an annual royalty to the owners and sharecroppers, for the use of their land? With an annual turnover of Rs 5,000 crore (from 500,000 cars), the royalty would have amounted to Rs 1.25 lakh per acre per year to be split between the landowners and sharecroppers. To recover this added outlay Tatas would have had to increase the price of their car by only Rs 250!
Would Mamata Banerjee really have spurned such an offer? Would the farmers have allowed her to? A senior Trinamool member of the Rajya Sabha told me some weeks ago that if Tatas were prepared to make such an offer Mamata would most probably accept it. But Tatas never made it.
Ratan Tata cannot be blamed for not trying an approach that has never been tried before in this country. But what he has proved, beyond a shadow of doubt is that he is no Jamshed Tata.
The stark truth is that the country is on the brink of class war. Bastar is today its epicentre. The security forces are fighting a losing battle against an estimated 6,000 armed Maoists who are receiving substantial aid from the local people because the state has lined up 7.28 billion dollars of investment in steel plants and iron ore mines in the next five years and has given out more than 150 prospecting licenses covering 400 to 3,000 sq. km to companies wanting to mine iron ore, diamonds, gold and other non-ferrous ores.
Development consumes land, and faster development consumes it faster. Singur, and Bastar are only the beginning.
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