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| Mamata faces two immediate challenges |
| Pradeep Gooptu / New Delhi May 18, 2009, 01:42 IST |
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Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee needs to decide on two major projects in West Bengal where her local party units were opposing land acquisition.
The first was the airport-township project of Bengal Aerotropolis Projects Ltd (BAPL) promoted by a Kolkata-based infrastructure group close to Civil Aviation minister Praful Patel with support from Singapore’s Changi Airport at Andal, 220 km west of Kolkata.
Centred around an abandoned airport, the project entailed acquisition of farmland and the process had been completed by the district magistrate of Barddhaman. A majority of the local community had boycotted the acquisition process under the Trinamool Congress leadership, demanding better price for land and direct interaction with the promoters.
The rehabilitation package at Andal was seen to be good, promising cash compensation, a sort of annuity and small plots in the commercial zone inside the project site to land losers.
The second project was the 1500-Mw thermal power station at Katwa, a prosperous farming area at the confluence of the Hooghly and Ajoy rivers, 100 km north of Kolkata, where the TC unit said it preferred shifting of the project to less fertile areas, besides better pricing and a comprehensive compensation and rehabilitation package.
He admitted though that Banerjee established the huge incentives given to the Nano project by the state, which compared poorly with the relatively paltry compensation given to the 13000-odd farmers who lost their land in the 1000-acre plot at Singur near Kolkata, under the Land Acquisition Act of 1898 used by the state.
“It is not her fault that the state bureaucracy is so incompetent that it has not been able to prepare a map of non-fertile or waste land in the state in three years where Mamata Banerjee wants industry to be located”, said one industrialist unwilling to be named.
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