KMDA still to come to terms with DLF walk-out in Dankuni

The 4,840-acre Dankuni township project near Kolkata, with an investment requirement of Rs 33,000 crore is still in the list of public private partnership (PPP) projects on the Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority (KMDA) website, even though DLF, the private partner, has abandoned it long back.

However, for all practical purposes, the project, once hailed as one of the biggest PPP township project in the country, stands scrapped, or at least “on hold” till the 2011 Assembly elections.

Ever since real estate major DLF walked out of the project, the state government has shown little interest in acquiring or purchasing land for it.

According to sources, not a single inch of land is with the government for the project, and the government is also not willing to entangle itself in any new land acquisition-related controversy, something which has kept the state government in the limelight for the last three-four years.

No private developer has so far shown any interest in partnering with the government for the project.

On being asked about the government's plans for the Dankuni township, Ashok Bhattacharya, urban development minister, West Bengal, said, “There is no immediate plan for restarting the project, though it is not scrapped.”

Conceived in 2006, the township was to have 4,069 acres for residential units and allied activities and 771 acre exclusive for industries.

DLF had even paid Rs 271 crore to the state government in 2007 after it emerged as the highest bidder, leaving developers like Emaar-MGF, Suncity and Bengal Ambuja behind. After DLF's exit, the state government has paid back about Rs 266 crore to the developer after deducting about Rs 5 crore.

Dankuni had been a site of simmering tension since panchayat elections last year, when several political outfits and farmers’ lobbies began an agitation over the low compensation being offered for land. While DLF had offered the government a price of Rs 56 lakh an acre, or around Rs 2,700 crore for development rights on the land over 999 years, the land procurement committee for the project offered farmers Rs 7 lakh an acre for fallow land, Rs 12 lakh for multi-crop land and Rs 14 lakh for homesteads.

The opposition Trinamool Congress had won most of the seats in the three-tier panchayat elections there in May last year, and had been up in arms on the issue of compensation prices. The state government had also tried to experiment with direct land procured by the government agency KMDA directly from farmers with their consent, but with little success.