The unprecedented vandalism by the Trinamool Congress in the assembly, atrocities by Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s police in Singur and the consequent agitation are gradually making investment in the proposed automobile factory by the Tatas a convoluted and ruffled affair. The Trinamool chief had never had a reputation for being levelheaded. But the Communist Party of India (Marxist), always known for its ruthlessly calculating moves, is posing the obvious puzzle: why is the party and its government dealing with the land acquisition question so high-handedly?

The administration is claiming that the large concourse in Singur, to protest and prevent the fencing of the agricultural land earmarked for the small car factory, comprised mainly of outsiders. The protesters, the claim goes, were an assorted lot, consisting of activists of the Socialist Unity Centre of India, Naxalites and others, who had assembled in Singur to enhance their own political visibility. Very few actual farmers were present among the demonstrators for the simple reason that most farmers had voluntarily sold off their land to the government for an adequate compensation. The opposite claim, of course, is that the congregation consisted mostly of actual tillers of the soil who were desperately trying to prevent the loss of their livelihood, the forceful appropriation of their only means of survival.

We are confused. We, the citizens of the country and residents of the state, have a right to know what is actually going on, especially because the land transactions in question are not private business dealings. Here, land is being taken away from the farmers by the state in public interest. So the public is perfectly entitled to have full information of the happenings. But even if the government had the good intention of providing information, it is not easy to do so. Among counter-claims by the opposition, how do we know if the government is telling the truth? How do we know if the demonstrators in Singur are mostly sons of the soil or politically ambitious outsiders? There are, indeed, ways of knowing. If direct methods fail, there are certain indirect methods of ascertaining whether the government is fooling the people. But before we go into them, we have to identify the issues, separate out facts from emotions, and isolate long-term economic questions from short-term political interests.

The basic issue is one of development leading to displacement. No sensible person will deny that agriculture in West Bengal has reached its frontier and to provide a decent livelihood to the wretched lot, who are still dependent on an overcrowded agriculture, it is now imperative to develop the long- neglected industrial sector. But industries cannot be built in thin air. Among other things, one needs land to build factories, roads, bridges, airports and other infrastructural necessities that are essential to put together an industrial network in the state. Where will the land come from?

In a state like West Bengal, where the man-land ratio is three times as high as that in the rest of the country, almost every bit of land is already in use in some form or the other. Out of this, a large chunk — 63 per cent of the total available land to be exact — is put under cultivation. So, if an investor comes to the state and picks up a piece of land at random for his factory, the probability that the chosen piece is agricultural, is indeed quite high.

Investors are unlikely to choose sites at random though. They usually have good reasons to supplement their choice. The Tatas, for example, have chosen Singur because of its proximity to Calcutta and its nearness to the Durgapur Expressway, the only modern highway in the state, and because plenty of water is available in the neighbourhood. And it happens that the land they have chosen is fertile agricultural land. If they are denied this land and asked to build their factory in some other place which lacks the essential facilities, they will probably pack up and invest elsewhere in the country.

Indeed, quite a few competing states would be much too eager to have their investment. Industrialization, it seems, is a competitive business. So it would be a disaster to deny the Tatas their chosen land. The fact that the land is fertile or that it produces two or three crops a year is of little macroeconomic consequence because the land in question is minuscule compared to the total cultivated land in the state. Its appropriation by the Tatas cannot possibly affect aggregate food production in West Bengal in any conceivable way.

The real problem is microeconomic; it pertains to those who are losing their land and their livelihood. It pertains to the tillers of the soil and to others who depend on the appropriated land for their daily bread, to owner-cultivators, sharecroppers, landless agricultural labourers and even small local traders, whose economic existence had so far been rooted in those tiny plots of land in Singur that are proposed to be handed over to the Tatas. How are these displaced people compensated?

Indeed, the question of compensation is of paramount importance. It is important not only because the government, which is grabbing land in the name of public interest, has a moral responsibility to compensate the loser, but also because the loser is the least likely candidate to get any employment in the factory to be set up by the Tatas. Most important, the entire compensation package has to be made public.

We have a right to know how land is being evaluated, on what basis compensations are arrived at and how they are distributed between owners and sharecroppers. We have a right to know whether landless labourers and others, whose livelihood depended on the soil but who did not have any legal right over land, are being compensated at all. If the whole package is made public and if by looking at it we can convince ourselves that compensations are fair, we can accept the government’s claim that most people have voluntarily handed over their plots of land to the authorities and we can believe the official story that most agitators in Singur are outsiders with political ambitions and axes of their own to grind. We know how much income a plot of land might fetch in Singur, we know the rates of interest and can predict the rate of inflation. So, we can roughly tell, if given full information about the compensation package, whether the offered settlement money is enough to maintain the living standard of the loser for a reasonable number of years.

The trouble is that the government has been frightfully non-transparent as far as the compensation package and other financial matters are concerned. What we need instead is a white paper from the government documenting the detailed calculations of the compensations. We also need to know how much money is expected to come from the Tatas as the price of the acquired land and how is the difference, if any, between the payment made by the Tatas and the money given out as compensation, proposed to be financed. We come across all sorts of unofficial figures in the media, which are often contradictory. We need to know the truth. Indeed, the whole affair cannot be a trade secret of the government. We believe that if the government were able to come up with a healthy dose of transparency, most of its critiques would be silenced. If, on the other hand, it continues to maintain its current stance of furtiveness, there would be good reasons to believe that it has indeed something vital to hide. The leftists of West Bengal must realize that the authoritarian Chinese model of development cannot be applied here. They should understand that a minimum consensus among the citizens is needed before any particular path of industrialization can be embarked upon, because, however faulty, we do have a democracy in our country which we all cherish.