Braving incessant rain and employing drones and satellite mapping technology, the West Bengal government is carrying out the Singur survey expeditiously for initiating the process of returning land taken from farmers of the area for the Tata Motors Nano project, an official said on Saturday.
Following the Supreme Court verdict, the Mamata Banerjee government started the land survey within the project area on Friday. The survey is to be completed within 10 weeks.
State Education minister and Trinamool Congress secretary general Partha Chatterjee visited the site on Saturday. He camped at Singur to supervise the survey work. According to the instruction of the Chief Minister, one minister should be present during the survey. On Friday, the work was supervised by state labour minister Malay Ghatak.
Chatterjee said the stage of the victory rally on September 14 would be set up beside the place where the meetings to protest the acquisition of land by the then Left Front government were held nearly a decade ago. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee will address the gathering after holding an administrative meeting at Singur on September 14. He reiterated that the Singur movement would be incorporated in the school curriculum. The syllabus committee approved the proposal at a meeting held on Friday. “We want our next generation to know about the movement in details and how Mamata Banerjee stood by the farmers whose land was forcibly acquired by the state government to set up an automobile industry.” He said the Supreme Court had given a landmark judgment and “it was an eye opener in the history of the farmer’s movement in India.”
Meanwhile, the identification of plot is going on in full swing. Senior officials of the land and land reforms department along with their counterparts in the district began the survey and identification of the plots from the morning. Their work is being supervised by Chatterjee. The state government has decided to engage the labourers working in the 100-days work programme under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme to level the ground.