Editorial:The laggard syndrome

It could be asked whether disputes over the acquisition of land for industry are predominantly in the eastern states, and if so why. In short, is it a vicious circle where the absence of industrialisation (and therefore the absence of alternative livelihoods) prevents new industries from coming in? If so, this reflects the great divide among states that are among the industrial haves, and those that are the have-nots. It would explain why large special economic zones appear to come up with comparative ease in industrialised states like Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Haryana. Auto-component makers and engineering companies are pouring investments — and acquiring land to do so — in Pune and Chennai to take advantage of the industrial development in these areas. But hardly any large project of note has got off the ground in the mainly agrarian east though, ironically, India’s super-mega investments — the ones with strong transformational potential, such as the massive steel plants by Korean major Posco, Tata Steel, Jindal and mining projects by Mittal — are all located in this region.

 

Run an eye over the hurdles facing all these projects and the common factor is people’s resistance to land acquisition (environmental and other “cultural” concerns are usually free riders). In Nandigram, a district three hours’ drive from Kolkata, this resistance reached such a pitch that the Left was forced to scrap plans for a 400-acre chemical hub last year. Land acquisition has become a major sticking point in this region simply because land-losers have scarcely been exposed to the “demonstration effect” of industrialisation, in the way western India and parts of the north and south have. The Tata group’s very visible transformation of Jamshedpur is too isolated an instance to convince anyone of the spillover benefits of large-scale industrialisation. Also the decrepit conditions of many factories in Bihar and West Bengal — another contrast to the west and south — scarcely raise confidence levels in swapping an arcadian agrarian life for the Dickensian horrors of a factory job. Quite understandably, when the choice is between losing a tangible asset and gaining little in return, the lack of exposure heightens fears and suspicions among the marginalised that no amount of local political pressure or intellectual argument can assuage.

This has put reform-minded governments in a bind because they urgently need to industrialise so that their states lose the dubious distinction of heading the country’s poverty statistics. The mineral resource-rich Orissa, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh have the highest percentage of people below the poverty line — and, unsurprisingly, are the locus of Naxalite and sundry local terror groups. West Bengal is outside this list — in fact, it has fewer people below the poverty line than, say, industrialised Maharashtra. But its long-ruling Left Front is paying the price of three decades of assiduous attention to agrarian reform that assured it 31 years in power but without a matching lack of concern for industrial growth. Unlike its eastern brethren, West Bengal has a relatively well-educated population going for it, so the state has become a test case. If there is a lesson in the events at Singur, it is the hazards of being a laggard. But to play catch-up with India’s more prosperous states, West Bengal needs a show-case success. Without Singur, that task becomes more difficult than ever.