Click to play videoNew Delhi: Nano, the world’s cheapest car, may soon roll out of Singur in West Bengal after a two-week long dispute over farmland ended on Sunday night.
The deadlock following the farmers' agitation against Tata Motors' small car project was resolved late on Sunday night as the state government agreed to form a committee to look into the demand and the opposition Trinamool Congress suspended its campaign against it.
Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi, who mediated the talks between the Left Front government and the Trinamool, told reporters after several rounds of talks and some twists that the imbroglio was resolved and a compromise formula had been worked out.
The agreement said the government "has taken the decision to respond to the demand of those farmers who have not received compensation, by means of land to be provided to the maximum within the project area and the rest in adjacent areas as early as possible".
"Towards this, a committee will be constituted to ascertain the scope and settle the modalities within a period of one week. During this time, the government will urge the vendors not to make any construction," according to the text of the pact inked by Industries Minister Nirupam Sen and Leader of Opposition Partha Chattopadhyay.
Earlier, sources told CNN-IBN a new compensation package has been worked out, according to which the government is likely to return around 200 acres of land in and around the factory to “unwilling farmers”. A committee will be set up to look into the land dispute.
Mamata Banerjee, who led the protests against the car factory, will call off her agitation in 24 hours as part of the deal with the government, sources say.
"It's a total victory", she said. She soon left for Singur to formally call off the protest at the factory site.
This is the first time the two leaders met following a bitter controversy over acquisition of agricultural land for the $25-million Nano project in Singur, about 40 km from Kolkata.
The KJJRC had been agitating on the demand that 400 acres "forcibly" acquired by the government from "unwilling farmers" for the project be returned.
Banerjee said the opposition also suggested that the ancillary units be shifted to a plot of land opposite the project site. "But work in the mother plant can go on," she said.
The 110-minute tete-a-tete between Bhattacharjee and Banerjee in the presence of Gandhi and his adviser for the talks, former justice Chittatosh Mukherjee, helped hammer out an "acceptable forumula", but soon after the chief minister left for his party headquarters, Banerjee did a volte-face.
How it came about
In the morning, Bhattacharjee first met the Governor individually. Left Front chairperson Biman Bose gave a statement that both sides had taken steps forward to resolve the dispute.
Banerjee then reached Rajbhavan at 1500 hrs IST and after more than an hour, Bhattacharjee joined her for talks.
The state committee of the ruling Left Front, after a meeting on Sunday, urged the state government to be more flexible and try to find more land, if needed, to resolve the issue.
In New Delhi, CPI-M general secretary Prakash Karat broke his silence on the controversy, saying his party wanted the Tata Motors to stay in West Bengal.
CPI leader D Raja told CNN-IBN the West Bengal government had offered a “meaningful dialogue” to solve the dispute. “This is a lesson for not only for West Bengal government but for all governments. When land is acquired for a project, consensus has to be arrived at. You have to win the confidence of people and of political parties,” he said.
The government had on Friday presented a package, including provision for shopping malls on a plot adjacent to the Nano plant, for those who had given their land.
After the protests intensified, and its officers and workers were threatened and manhandled, the Tata group last week suspended work at the factory, saying it will not put its employees at risk.
The factory employs some 800 people, including engineers from South Korea and Singapore. The company also threatened to relocate the project to some other state if the protests continued.
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