Farmland or Factory Site?

Singur is a small farming community in the West Bengal province of India. The agricultural way of life has supported the people of this community for hundreds of years. Their land is particularly fertile due to the fact that it is part of the Hooghly river valley. The land in this area is capable of producing multiple rice harvests each year and has been a source of wealth for the villages of this area for generations.

Tata Motors is part of a vast multinational corporation that emerged from the recent successful industrialisation of India that has occurred over the last 20 years. Tata Group, founded in 1868 by Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata as a trading company in Bombay, is one of the largest conglomerates in the world. Ushered in by reforms starting in 1990, the opening up of the Indian economy allowed Tata Holdings to become one of the most powerful international businesses in the world.

Tata motors took the decision to build a new plant in Singur as a result of a secret contract with the government. This is particularly ironic since the ruling government of the West Bengal province proclaims itself to be Communist.

The people of Singur have halted construction work at the new plant through a combination of political pressure and protests. These actions have forced the government to return to the negotiating table with Tata Motors to revisit the compensation offered to the people of Singur farmers.

Many reports present this issue as a matter of financial compensation that paints the farmers as money grubbing complainers who are upset about not getting their fair share of what is expected to be a very successful project. For some farmers, this characteristic may very well be true. It is very easy to paint the leaders of the protest movement with this brush, but not all of the farmers think this way. One farmer, Tayab Ali Mandal, 52, of Joymolla village, is quoted as saying, "We are farmers; we know only farm work; we don't know any paper-pencil work... I won't go inside that place even to urinate. We are disgusted by that place."

There are some protesting farmers, such as Gopal Santra, who would not even accept money for their land, but some reports misrepresent this as a tactic to ensure that they got a better deal for the sale.

This problem of industrialisation versus agriculture will only grow larger as the amount of arable land around the world shrinks. It would seem that it would be far more prudent to place factories in locations where agriculture will not work effectively, especially in a country of 1.1 billion people, where the lack of food has in the past become a major issue. Meanwhile, the people of India's farming class continue to be faced with the decision of abandoning their traditional way of life for an uncertain life in the cities, where every form of human corruption flourishes among the rich and the poor alike.