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By Aparna Pallavi A year after 1,000 acres of land were acquired by the West Bengal government, Singur is quiet but simmering. "We are land people, we live on land and with land," say locals in this update. Only 300 of the 1200 landowners have accepted compensation
 The lyrical peace of the lush green landscape – fields, even in the height of summer, green with healthy crops of jute and vegetables, ponds and khaals (streams) full of water – turns sombre and threatening as one nears the compound of Tata. The long row of police vehicles lined up along the road and the khaki tents abruptly turn paradise into a war zone. The newly erected compound wall of the upcoming car factory, hedged all the way by mud barricades and a deep trench, with groups of armed and armoured policemen posted every few feet, offers no relief.
 A year after the West Bengal government acquired 1,000 acres of land for Tata’s car factory, forcibly, as recent events are finally proving, Singur is quiet, but sullen. The government, between tall claims and foot-in-the-mouth admissions, is defensive but adamant, and the people are swinging between unbearable anger and crushing despair.
The impact of what the land acquisition has done to the lives of the people is coming to the fore, slowly, painfully. In village Dobandi, located adjacent to the wall of the Tata compound, every one of the 90 families of sharecroppers in the village has lost its rich, four-crop lands and their livelihood. While able-bodied men are scraping together meagre earnings of Rs 30 per day for their families as labourers, that too by commuting around 15 kilometres per day, seven women-headed families in the village are on the verge of starvation. Says Shyamacharan Patra, a village leader, “The Tata factory has not only taken away our lands but also changed the very geography of our village. They have blocked a diverted khaal (small stream) that used to run by the village, and they have built embankments in such a way that the rains will flood the village. We have lost our land, our livelihood and even the safety of our village.” In village Khesher Bheri, ‘development’ has a different face altogether. Thirty-year-old Sandhya Das faints when she tries to talk about her husband Prashant Das’s suicide. After she is restored she says, “He was a good farmer and loved his land. We lost all five bighas (local measures – one acre is roughly equal to three bighas) of our family land to the factory.” According to Sandhya, Prashant was very tense since the loss of the land, since the family has no other source of livelihood. “We were sustaining ourselves on the hope that our struggle would one day get us our land back. That day he saw Tata’s excavators digging a deep pit on our land. He came back and told me that it would be no use even getting the land back, since it has been ruined for good. And in the evening he committed suicide…..”  Sandhya’s family, like all the farming families in the village, has been living on stocks of paddy and potatoes from last year’s crop. “We do not know what we will do when that is finished,” says Padmabati Das, a neighbour, worry and helplessness writ large all over her face.
At Ratanpur turning, known also as ‘aaloo mod’ because of the potato godowns that supply the famous Chandramukhi potatoes of Singur to the entire country and provide employment to around 5,000 migrant and local labourers, the mood is bleak. Many godowns are empty and locked, and in the few that are functional, stocks are low. These godowns used to hold stocks of 150,000 quintals of potatoes per season before the land was acquired, and the supply of potatoes has gone down further because of the political unrest in the entire region. Labourers working in the godowns told this correspondent that drop in employment has already started and is expected to escalate. Amidst all the despondence, there is also a sense of intense anger among the people of the region. The resistance to the forced land acquisition is still strong. According to Swapan Ganguli of the Singur Krishi Jami Rakkha Committee (SKJRC), out of the total of 12,000 landowners whose lands were acquired, less than 300 have collected compensation cheques from the government, and the demand for the return of land is still strong. This, despite the fact that the compensation was revised upwards thrice, taking the final offer from the government up to Rs 8 lakh per acre. “Since September last year the government has been threatening to deposit the cheques with the court, but till date it has not taken the step” says Ganguli. “The pressure of people’s resentment is still strong on the government.” The rejection of compensation is not just limited to landowners. Even sharecroppers, who were granted permanent cultivation rights under land reforms in the state, have not accepted the 25% compensation that the state has reserved for them. Of the around 1,200 unregistered sharecroppers in the area (according to a study conducted by Sanhati Udyog), just 360 or so have applied for compensation with the collector. In village Dobandi, not a single of the 90 sharecropping families has applied for compensation. In fact, the villagers even rejected Tata’s offers for constructing pucca houses, roads and toilets in the village. In village Beraberi, Arun Bagh’s anger threatens to boil over as he tells of his experience with officials after his father, farmer Haradhan Bagh, committed suicide, “They asked me what compensation you want. I told them, don’t you dare talk of compensation. My father died for this land and I will never give it up.” Towards the end of May this year, 375 landowners filed a petition in court declaring that their lands had been taken by the government by force. This, in effect, challenged Chief Minister Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s claim that the land in Singur had been acquired by consent. Around the same time, the government finally admitted that the land in Singur is very high quality agricultural land, as opposed to the ‘non-irrigated mono-crop land’ that its own records had earlier claimed it to be. In the chief minister’s own words, the acquisition of this land has been a ‘mistake’. Finally, what do the people in Singur want? “Our land back, and nothing else,” says Prashant Das’s brother Tapas, an active member of the SKJRC. “The people of Singur do not want compensation for their land, however high the compensation might be (at the present moment it is around one-tenth the market price, which is nearly Rs 90 lakh per acre, owing partly to its agricultural promise and partly to its strategic location). Money does not last. We are land people, and we live on the land and with the land.” The political situation in Singur is complex, and it is difficult to predict the outcome. On the one hand, people have refused to accept compensation and are strong on their demand for the return of their land, while on the other, the work in the Tata compound is going on at a brisk pace, unaffected by public outrage. So, will the farmers of Singur get their land back? “It is a final battle now, a war of nerves,” says Swapan Ganguli. “For a whole year now the Tata compound has been under heavy police protection. Just how long can the government do this? How long can Tata hope to function against people’s resentment? It is true that the people’s side has not come out exactly clean – there have been suicides, some people have just given up and made a sheepish beeline to the collector’s office for cheques. It is a question of who holds out, that’s all.” (Aparna Pallavi is an independent journalist based in Nagpur) InfoChange News & Features, July 2007
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