Tata Institute of Social Sciences

Tuljapur Campus, Maharashtra

Assignment on Social Movement

Under the guidance of

Prof. Ramesh Jare

Course Coordinator, MSW (RD)

Submitted by

Prasun Sadhukhan

Roll. - 34, 2nd Semester

MSW (RD)
 SINGUR MOVEMENT
1. Background:

Immediately after its 2006 ‗industrial

development‘-led electoral victory, the government
started an intensive campaign to win a big-ticket
project to catapult the state into the big league of
investment destinations. The much coveted ‗Nano‘
project of TATA Motors (a small car with a
promised price-tag of Rs. 1 lakh only) was

announced. Amidst much fanfare, the government Photo 1: Factory under construction in fertile
promised that the Nano project would turn West agricultural land
Bengal into India‘s next automobile hub.

Singur has a thriving farming community in the Hooghly district of the Indian state of West
Bengal. It‘s around 20,000 inhabitants‘ mostly small peasants, agricultural workers and small
traders. The controversy was sparked by the decision to
acquire 997 acres of agricultural land for the factory, as
the site chosen was in the agriculturally prosperous
town of Singur, approximately 40 km from the state
capital Kolkata. The land was mainly spread across
five mouzas12—Berabheri, Gopalnagar, Singherbheri,
Bajemelia, and Khaserbheri—with marginal/small

Photo 2: Forceful acquisition of farm land farmers constituting more than 50% of the population.
There was also a sizeable section (25–30%) of
unregistered sharecroppers and landless people (WBIDC 2006, P. Banerjee 2006). The initial
compensation offered was Rs. 8.7 lakhs and Rs. 12.8 lakhs per acre for single-cropped and
double-cropped land respectively for landowners; registered sharecroppers were to receive 25%
of this value.
 2. Ideology:

Many of the landed gentry, some of them absentee, who own bigger portions of land, depend on
‗kishans‘ (i.e, hired labors, bargadars etc.) for cultivation of their lands. They principally depend
on business or service and have come forward to part with their land in lieu of cash. The Left
Front (LF) government is banking on these people in the process of land acquisition, persons
who are known to be traditional supporters of the anti-LF parties. On the other hand, the poorer
sections of the peasantry, who constitute the main support base for the LF in the state, are in the
forefront of the movement, seeking help from all those coming forward in support of their cause.
Notably, not all the LF partners seem to be happy with the developments regarding Singur. This
polysemic feature of Singur movements is, however, often submerged in activist accounts, media
coverage and some academic analyses that concern themselves with imposing a unitary sense of
meaning and direction on a given movement—for instance by labeling them ‗environmentalist‘,
‗anti-globalization‘, or ‗anti-imperialist‘. My argument here is that the polysemic nature of social
movements needs to be explored more thoroughly with reference to the plurality of experiences,
ideologies and interests they contain and articulate.

3. Leadership aspects:

The displaced farmers were politically supported by

the then chief opposition leader of WB, Mamata
Banerjee and Socialist Unity Centre of India. Her
―Save Farmland‖ (Jomi Banchao) movement had
received widespread support from civil rights and
human rights groups, legal bodies, social activists like
Medha Patkar and Anuradha Talwar, Booker prize-
winning author Arundhati Roy and Magsaysay and
Jnanpith award-winning author Mahasweta Devi.
Several Kolkata based intellectuals and artists like Photo 3: Leader of Singur Movement, Mamata
Aparna Sen, Kaushik Sen, Shaonli Mitra, Banerjee got support of Social Activist Medha
Patkar
Subhaprasanna, Ruchit Shah. The Nobel laureate
Amartya Sen supported the idea of factory but he however opposed forcible acquisition of land.
 4. Chronology of events (From Nano to no-no! - Singur to Sanand):
9
• Tata Motors announces Nano plant in West Bengal
May 18
2006

 Mamata Banerjee starts dharna at Singur

Aug 24
2008

 Tata Motors suspends work on Nano plant

Sept 2
2008

 Tata Motors decides to move out of Singur

Oct 3
2008

 Banerjee sworn in Bengal Chief Minister, announces

May 20, decision to return 400 acres to unwilling farmers
2011

 The historic Singur Land Rehabilitation and

June 14, Development Bill, 2011, passed in the assembly
2011

 Calcutta High Court upholds Singur Act

Sept 28,
2011

 Tata Motors challenges the order

Oct 29,
2011

• West Bengal government moves Supreme Court (SC)

Aug 6,
2012

• SC quashes land acquisition for Tata Motors in Singur

Aug 31,
2016
 5. Institutional aspects:

The project‘s announcement caused immediate apprehensions about the loss of land and
livelihood. The first organized agitation took place on 25 May 2006, and soon after, a Krishijami
Raksha Committee (Save Agricultural Land Committee) was formed, which held its first
demonstration on 1 June. Between 9 May and 27 September there were nine meetings between
the government and local representatives, including four with the Krishijami Raksha Committee,
but they failed to reach a consensus. The protests escalated rapidly, bringing together a motley
political coalition spearheaded by the TMC under its leader Mamata Banerjee. Their specific
demand was to return 400 acres that belonged to unwilling farmers (plot-holders who refused to
part with their land and collect compensation, although some were absentee
landlords/businessmen). On 25 September, the day scheduled for compensation disbursement,
the local block office was surrounded by thousands of protestors demanding the process be

Photo 4: Protest rally of Singur Krishi Jomi Raksha Committee

stopped. What happened during the following hours remains unclear, but the police finally
resorted to a lathi (stick or baton)-charge that resulted in one dead, and several injured. Another
phase of violent clashes took place in December, and the government imposed prohibitory orders
to continue operations. A ceremonial inauguration of the factory took place on 21 January 2007,
with the prohibitory orders still in place.
Construction continued throughout 2007 and the first half of 2008 amidst regular protests and
agitations. However, a fresh bout of intense agitation led by Mamata Banerjee in August 2008
brought work to a complete standstill. This led to another series of inconclusive negotiations
between the government and the opposition, culminating in a formal withdrawal of the project by
TATA Motors, announced on 3 October 2008.

6. The Peasants Narrative:

The people of Singur are quite aware of how industrial jobs are prone to downsizing.
Accordingly, the best solution from the peasants‘ point of view was to diversify income
strategies and not abandon cultivation for wage labor, which would merely replace one set of
risks with another. Many among the less-educated also doubted whether a high-tech modern car
factory would actually provide the kind of jobs they could perform. The peasants thus generally
had no objection to the chief minister‘s vision of re-industrialization. They by and large
welcomed the move towards industrialization and also endorsed the idea and merits of the Tata
project per se. They wanted Tata to stay in Singur; they just did not want the proposed factory to
occupy agricultural land—particularly not their land. matters were made worse, from the ‗land-
losers‘ perspective, by the fact that those fortunate enough to own land adjacent to but outside

Photo 6: Protest of peasants' committee Photo 5: Peasants at Dharna for protest

the Tata factory now stood to make a fortune: land prices in Singur had soared dramatically
following the announcement that Tata was buying.52 Land-losers felt that the LFG‘s
intervention had deprived them of a similar opportunity to make a profit. While the market thus
figured as an important frame of reference in the peasant narrative, the logic of market forces
was not itself seen as a problem; it was the distortion of the market through government
intervention that came to be criticized. In this re-telling, the story of Singur evolved into a much
grander narrative.

7. The Activists Perspective:

Organizations such as the Association for Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR) approached
Singur as a case of civil rights violations. It filed petitions against the land acquisition in court
and in line with its civil rights approach, published reports documenting police atrocities. Three
other organizations working in collaboration—the Institute for Motivating Self Employment
(IMSE), the People‘s Coalition on Food Sovereignty (PCFS), and the Food First Information and
Action Network (FIAN)— approached Singur from the point of view of violations of
international law and the right to food.

Social activist Medha Patkar and her National

Alliance for People‘s Movements (NAPM)
saw Singur as yet another instance of
development-induced displacement—in certain
respects comparable to that caused by the
construction of large-scale dams. However, in
contrast to ‗older‘ forms of displacement
caused by state-led development projects,
NAPM activists saw Singur as an entirely new
form, one where projects are ultimately driven

by private capital. They similarly criticized Photo 7: Social Activist Medha Patkar with the
what Reddy and Reddy have called an then opposition leader Mamata Banerjee
unreasonable tendency to bring more and more activities under the purview of ‗development‘.
For that reason, moving the factory elsewhere in the area—as suggested in the peasant
narrative—was never to the activists a viable solution. It would merely relocate the problem, not
solve it.
From the environmentalist point of view, political parties on both the Right and Left were at fault
because they both saw environmentally destructive large-scale industrialization as the key to
growth and development. Environmentalists and neo-Gandhians instead advocated subsistence
farming and small-scale cottage industries as being the only sustainable alternative.

8. The Leftist Narrative—SUCI and Others:

The problem was that the only party in Singur besides the CPI(M) with any mass following was
the TMC. But apart from the grassroots level active Singur Krishi Jomi Raksha Committee
(SKJRC), there was another from the leftist corner, the Socialist Unity Centre of India (SUCI).

Photo 8: Leftist's rally in support of TATA factory and employment

SUCI approached the Singur movement as a struggle against neo-liberal capitalism and
imperialism. SUCI‘s insistence that ‗uninterrupted industrialization is essential for meeting the
growing needs of the people‘60 clearly did not go down well among the more environmentally-
conscious activists. If neo-liberalism was one of the targeted enemies in the SUCI narrative, the
CPI(M) was the other. While SUCI and the TMC could cooperate on a single-issue basis, such as
in Singur, any broader political alliance was completely out of the question. Though the SUCI‘s
job was to provide the necessary leadership to the Singur movement, but its inability to direct the
movement from within was most clearly brought out by the forceful entry into the movement of
the TMC‘s leader Mamata Banerjee, perhaps the most high-profile politician in West Bengal. In
certain areas of Singur activists from some minor parties on the Left, who were SKJRC
constituents, attempted to organize the agricultural laborers on a separate platform under their
stewardship and independently of the SKJRC, but met with limited success.

9. The TMC Narrative:

The TMC was involved from the movement‘s infancy. Mamata Banerjee stressed that she did
not blame Tata or the market for the Singur complication—her fight was solely against the Left
Front Government. When Nobel laureate Amartya Sen argued in a newspaper interview that
prohibiting the use of agricultural land for industry was ultimately selfdefeating,71 the TMC put
out a statement to the effect that if peasants had willingly surrendered agricultural land to the
government for industrialization, it would have no objection; it was forced acquisition they were
against. The policy of the TMC can therefore be regarded as generally ‗conspicuously inclusive‘.

Photo 9: TMC leader Mamata Banerjee leading protest rally against TATA factory at Singur

In the final analysis, it is worth noting how closely the TMC narrative resonates with that of the
peasants, for whom the location of the factory, rather than any opposition to industrialization, to
the market, or to private capital, was the main concern. Moreover, much as they appreciated the
support of activist groups and minor political parties, the peasants generally saw Mamata
Banerjee as the only agent powerful enough to effectively challenge the LFG. It was therefore
hardly surprising that the TMC leader had such a profound appeal among supporters of the
SKJRC in Singur.
 10. Impacts of the movement:

The consistent agitations by various civil societies, pressure groups etc. created such havoc under
which the corporate lost their hope to continue their business on that position and on October 3rd,
2008, Tata Motors pulled the plug on manufacturing the Nano out of Bengal, leaving behind
rubble of dashed hopes. 267 stories of broken dream are there, who were selected by Tata Motors
for training and permanent jobs. It resulted in
displacement of mass peasantry to the cities to search
for earning their breads and they marked as urban
beggars, unskilled laborers and odd city workers. The
huge lands remain unproductive and fallow till now.
Food security has become another area of concern. A
greater acquisition of agricultural land had a negative
impact on food production and created a greater
imbalance in the food security situation of the state.

The Singur peasant movement has succeeded in bringing Photo 10: Violent protest by public
these questions to the fore.

11. Critical aspects:

(Land Acquisition and Compensation in Singur: What Really Happened?)

There are two kinds of practical difficulties in ensuring that compensations are adequate, using
market values as the standard of adequacy. (a) Deciding on what is the correct market price for
any particular grade of land, owing to thinness of land markets, problems of obtaining correct
data on market transactions, and adjusting for endogenous selection of which properties do and
do not get sold. (b) Identifying the grade of land for any given plot. In the context of Singur, the
government ran into the second kind of problem in particular. This resulted in considerable
under-compensation of owners of superior grades of land, constituting about one-third of land
area and of affected owners. This played a role in decisions of owners to reject the offered
compensations. Getting the soil grade right would therefore have reduced the chances of
rejection and subsequent protest significantly.
Finally, the whole process of acquisition and compensation mattered. Consistent with the legal
framework for acquisition inherited from colonial times, the process was very top to down. Local
residents of the area repeatedly mentioned their sense of outrage at this. The state government
did not consult the local community in choosing the area for the Tata factory. Only after protests

Photo 11: After chairing as CM of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee returns their land to the
displaced farmer

snowballed did it offer to negotiate the compensations offered. There was a sense that
compensations offered were inadequate to offset the losses incurred by many of those directly
affected. Tenants were offered 25% compensation, in contrast to tenant shares exceeding 50%
under the existing sharecropper protection laws. The politicization of the compensation process
followed. Clearly there is much room for a more consultative process, in which local com-
munities are consulted and involved in selecting areas to be acquired, and in the design and
implementation of compensations.

12. Success or failure – the ground reality:

No one seems to be interested in the ground realities of Singur now, almost after one and a half
decade of the tumultuous 2006–07 in West Bengal. This kind of unconcern for the peasantry is
not new among the Kolkata-based academicians and intellectuals, who represented West Bengal
to India and the world since the colonial period. The Trinamool Congress government‘s
enthusiasm to generate capital and employment, either through legal means or by the play of
market forces, seemed to be mere populist political rhetoric for contesting election battles in
West Bengal. They are yet to develop any comprehensive resettlement and rehabilitation policy
for the thousands of families affected by various development projects. According to the Singur
Land Rehabilitation and Development Act, 2011, the government had reacquired about 1,000
acres of farmland from the Tatas, which was given to the company for building a small car
manufacturing factory in 2006 by the then LF government. The Trinamool government has
already returned 400 acres of farmland to the ―unwilling‖ farmers around whom the agitation
against the LF government was organized by their party. The failure of the land acquisition in
Singur by the LF government could neither generate a labor force freed from agriculture, nor
create enthusiasm and hope for the capitalist investors. The neo-Marxist theory of riding on the
shoulders of land reform to achieve a successful capital-intensive industrialization finally proved
to be a self-defeating exercise since the praxis sabotaged both past land reform and future
industrialization. On the other hand, the TMC government‘s enthusiasm to generate capital and
employment, either through legal means or by the play of market forces, seemed to be mere
populist political rhetoric for contesting election battles in West Bengal. This is the macro-
theoretical lesson one can learn after a decade of the Singur episode in the state of West Bengal
under liberalization.

Photo 12: Closed factory of Singur with thousands of dead dreams