Land acquisition should be the last resort: Amartya Sen

Kolkata, Jan 1 : Treating land acquisition as a first resort rather than the last in Singur was a blunder by the West Bengal government, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen said in a interview to The Telegraph published on Friday.

The West Bengal government acquired 100 acres of land in SIngur for the Tata Nano project. But Opposition Trinamool Congress alleged that out of the acquired land, 400 acres were acquiured forcefully and must be reuturned. The Trinamool agitations reached such a point when the Tatas had to leave the SIngur and shift their plant to Gujarat.

"The basic idea of industrial development is right, and in that respect, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's basic policy was correct," he said.

"And yet there were two major lacunae in the governmental implementation of the industrialisation strategy. One was in treating land acquisition as the first resort rather than as the last resort, and the other in not having adequate public discussion with other parties to arrive at some agreed conclusions," he added.

Sen stated that Bengal has been one of the most industrialised parts of the world since long back. Traders from country after country, the British, the Danes, the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Flemish, the Dutch, were competing with each other in the 17th and 18th centuries to do trading in this part of the world, mainly getting industrial products.

"Our prosperity was based on industry, in addition to a flourishing agriculture, between which there need be no rivalry. When Britain occupied India, Bengal was the richest part of the country, and today it's become one of the poorer parts," he said.

Stating that the Communist Party of India -Marxist (CPI-M) policies of the past also contributed to this condition, Sen said the party gave industrial leaders the impression that this was a not very friendly state to base industries in. "The CPI-M has reversed its obstructionist policies now — indeed quite strongly —but by the time the policies were reversed, the general disaffection with the CPI-M was such that people wanted it to go," he said.

Speaking on land acquisition, Sen said an important but neglected aspect of the procedure is that the people whose interests are affected are not only the owners of land. "There would be a need to see that justice is done to them. That has to be a part of the public policy of the government," he said.

The interests of the peasants and of the local population should also be kept in mind during land acquisition. "Would the displaced people have been able to get jobs in the factory? How much would they benefit from the local business boom that would have undoubtedly accompanied industrial development in Singur? There are good reasons, based on economic reasoning, to think that the local boom — now sadly lost — would have been substantially beneficial to the local population in and around Singur," he added.