From the Tatas giving up on Singur to farmers in Haryana demanding more from an SEZ developer, land acquisition has been industry's worst nightmare in the past few years. Business Standard analyses what went wrong in some of the biggest projects that have hit the land-purchase roadblock.
Nandigram and Singur:
These two places in West Bengal have entered the Indian vocabulary as synonyms of violent protests against land acquisition for industry, an opposition that, at least in the state, seems to be a direct result of the government playing a role in the process.
In Nandigram, 150 km from Kolkata, the state government tried to take over nearly 22,000 acres for a petroleum, chemicals and petrochemicals investment region, popularly referred to as a chemicals hub, through the proposed elimination of around a dozen villages. In Singur, 40 km from Kolkata in the country's most fertile belt, it wanted to buy 1,000 acres of multi-crop farmland for a Tata Motors project.
Text: Pradeep Gooptu, Dillip Satapathy, Bishnu Dash, Makarand Gadgil, and Rituparna Bhuyan, Business Standard
Image: Protestors burn vehicles in Nandigram. | Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
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