Arbitration tribunal awards Tata Rs 766 crore compensation over Singur losses

The Mumbai-based automobile manufacturer has also been allowed to recover Rs 1 crore for the cost of the proceedings from WBIDC.

“With the making of the final arbitral award as mentioned above, the arbitral proceedings have come to an end,” Tata Motors said in the filing. While the chairperson of WBIDC, Vandana Yadav, was not available for comment, sources in the West Bengal government said the tribunal’s order would be challenged in the High Court. “The state government is taking legal advice on this issue,” said a senior official.

The ruling TMC played down the arbitral proceedings, stressing that it is not the “final verdict” and that legal options are available before the state government. “This is not a final verdict or a verdict by the Supreme Court. This is a ruling by an arbitral tribunal. It doesn’t mean this is the end of the road for the state government. Legal avenues are still open for the state government,” PTI quoted senior TMC MP Sougata Roy, as saying.

In 2006, the Left Front government in West Bengal had announced that Tata Motors would set up a car manufacturing unit to roll out its cheapest car, the Rs 1-lakh Nano. The Buddhadeb Bhattacharya-led government allotted about 1,000 acres of farmland to the company in Singur.

By October 2008, however, the company had scrapped its plans and shifted the plant to Sanand in Gujarat after facing stiff protests from opposition political parties — particularly the Trinamool Congress (TMC) which is now in power — and farmers in the area over land acquisition. By this time, Tata Motors had already put in more than Rs 1,000 crore in Singur.

Reacting to the tribunal’s ruling, the CPI(M), which is in the Opposition now, said West Bengal was “paying for the arrogance and destructive politics of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee with penalties for the demolition of a near-complete manufacturing unit along with the dream of job seekers”.

Describing the 2006 agitation led by Mamata Banerjee as “irrational and populistic”, CPI(M) Rajya Sabha MP and senior advocate Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya said: “This has caused serious damage not only to the industrialisation bid but also the social respect of West Bengal.”

“The state government is already in a debt trap… Now it has no resources to satisfy the award,” he told PTI.
The BJP, the main Opposition party in the state, accused both the TMC and CPI(M) of “killing the industrial potential in Singur”.

“BJP is fundamentally opposed to forcible land acquisition. But when the character of the land changed, there was no possibility of cultivation. We proposed to pay three times the market value to the landowners, providing employment to a member of the family, sharecropping and compensation to the landowners. Besides that, the proposal was to buy 100 acres of land and give back some land to 400 unwilling people. But the stubborn decision of Trinamool and the short-sightedness of the CPI(M) government killed the industrial potential in Singur,” state BJP spokesperson Shamik Bhattacharya said.

The Singur movement fuelled the rise of Mamata Banerjee and helped her party, TMC, come to power in West Bengal in 2011. Her government passed the Singur Land Rehabilitation and Development Act in 2011 to take over the land given to the Tatas by the Left government. The state has partly returned the land to its owners, PTI reported.

Tata Motors moved the Calcutta High Court challenging the law moved by the TMC government. The acquisition of the land was upheld by a trial court and the law was declared unconstitutional on appeal. After that, the dispute moved to the Supreme Court, which in 2016 ruled in favour of the farmers and declared that the land acquisition process was illegal.

The Sanand plant was inaugurated by the then-Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and Tata Group Chairman Ratan Tata. Tata discontinued the sales of the Nano in 2020.