7 months on, Singur lives on hope for Tata jobs

Eighteen-year old Snehasis Ghosh wanted to become a supervisor at the 'Nano' plant in Singur. That ambition will never be fulfilled, courtesy Mamata Banerjee, but all may not be lost for Ghosh.

Seven months after Tata Motors pulled out of Singur, residents in this sleepy little town, 40 km from Kolkata, are now living on another hope -- Tata jobs.

Ghosh is one of the 62 Singur residents who will appear for the National Council of Vocational Training certification next month, after completing a one-year practical training at the Tata Motors plant in Pune.

That's in keeping with Tata Group chairman Ratan Tata's promise that, while he was being forced to move the Nano project out of Singur, the group would continue to train over 450 people -- 267 of them local residents -- selected by Tata Motors.

While the first batch of 62 is ready for the NCVT certification exam, the others are still undergoing training at the company's plants in Pune, Jamshedpur, Pantnagar, and 70-80 dealerships.

Quite a few of them are from the local industrial training institutes. Under the NCVT rules, after completion of an ITI course, a person has to undergo practical training in his trade in an industry for at least a year. Their efforts would have gone waste had Tata decided not to keep his promise.

Tata Motors, in fact, has been spending Rs 7,000-8,000 per trainee per month for the last six to eight months. This takes care of a monthly Rs 1,700 stipend and boarding costs.

Ghosh was in Class XI studying science when Tata Motors started setting up the factory at Singur, but his parents convinced him that a Tata Motors job was the better option. "A job in the Singur plant is no longer possible, but I am hoping to get a job with the group in some other plant," Ghosh says.

There are many others like him. Amit Karmakar has been trained across Tata Motors' plants in Pune and Pantnagar, and a dealership in Gurgaon. He is awaiting news from Tata Motors about his exam date and is hoping that NCVT will get him a job somewhere.

However, there is no clarity whether people like Ghosh and Karmakar would be employed by Tata Motors -- a commitment the company had steered clear from even when it announced the Singur project.

A Tata Motors spokesperson did not want to share details on the issue.

The fact is that Tata Motors is at least ensuring that these trainees are employable. The country is woefully short of specialised technical talent.

There are 4,500 state-run technical institutes littered across India, but most of their curricula is out of sync with the automobile industry's needs.

But that is small consolation for quite a few in Singur. Lob Kumar Ghosh, for example, says the Tata pullout from Singur means his son, Suranjan, currently undergoing training at the Pune plant, will not get a job.

"No Tata, no job", says the Ghosh senior. "Suranjan will come back in August and be a burden on me. I had given land for the project in the hope that my son will get a job. My hopes have been dashed."

When Tata Motors announced the small car project in May 2006, it promised to employ 2,000 people directly initially.

The project was expected to create employment in excess of 10,000 jobs among vendors and service providers in the vicinity of the plant.

Ghosh and many others in Singur are angry with the West Bengal government for its inability to retain the project -- probably one of the reasons why the Communist Party of India-Marxist lost the Hooghly Lok Sabha seat, which includes Singur.