Barasat, June 25: A political consensus on Nandigram and Singur may be hard to come by, but almost all parties today agreed to cooperate over a survey of the land required to widen National Highways 34 and 35.

The Rs 5,300-crore project has been undertaken by the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) to widen the highways to four-lane ones with the provision for adding two more lanes.

NH-34 links Barasat in North 24-Parganas to Dalkhola in north Bengal, bordering Bihar, while the other highway connects Barasat to Petrapole on the Bangladesh border.

An all-party meeting convened by PWD minister Khsiti Goswami was attended by representatives of all Opposition parties, the Left Front constituents and a host of senior government officials.

Emerging from the meeting, the minister said the NHAI would prepare a survey report, detailing the amount and nature of land that needed to be acquired as well as the number of people who would be affected by the project.

“All parties have agreed to help the NHAI conduct the survey, which was earlier resisted by villagers backed by political forces. The approach paper based on the survey will be placed before the second round of the all-party meet that will take place shortly,” Goswami said.

“The land acquisition will begin after we arrive at a consensus regarding the compensation package for the would-be land-losers,” he added.

The Trinamul MLA from Gaighata, Jyotipriya Mallick, however, clarified that his party would help “only” in the survey of the land.

“We will support further actions only after going through the survey report,” Mallick said, adding that he had jotted down a “note of dissent” in the minutes of the meeting.

Congress’s Subhankar Sarkar echoed him.

The SUCI was the only party to strike a discordant note. It would not “allow the survey unless compensation packages are declared at the outset”, SUCI leader Sankar Ghosh said.

The front partners, however, chorused their support to the government.

“This project is a must for the ongoing industrialisation drive as the widened highway will connect the Haldia industrial hub with the upcoming Golden Quadrilateral in north Bengal, which will branch out to rest of the country,” said Aparna Gupta, the North 24-Parganas zilla parishad sabhadhipati.