Singur, Jan 28 (PTI) West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday said both agriculture and industry would thrive together in the state, with neither of the two encroaching into each other’s domains.
Speaking at a public meeting in Hooghly district’s Singur, 10 days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a rally here, Banerjee reiterated her stand on the agriculture-industry dichotomy in the state.
Like the PM, Banerjee too stopped short of making big-ticket investment announcements for the region from where the Tata Nano factory pulled out two decades ago in the face of violent agitation.
At the programme, the chief minister inaugurated or laid the foundation stone of 1694 state-sponsored services across all districts worth Rs 33,551 crore.
“We have commissioned a private industrial park in Singur over 77 acres of land where Amazon and Flipkart will set up large warehouses and generate employment for thousands of people,” Banerjee said.
“Over and above the existing benefits of the government’s welfare schemes which Singur farmers receive, we have built an agro-industrial park over eight acres of land here at a cost of Rs 9.2 crore with an aim to generate employment. Twenty-five out of 28 plots have already been allocated at the project site. Both agriculture and industry will thrive together, but not by forcefully grabbing farmland,” she added.
Banerjee maintained that Singur land losers for the small car project continue to receive monthly compensation from the state government while also having access to benefits like state schemes ‘Khadya Sathi’, ‘Swastha Sathi’ and other welfare programmes, involving health, education, food guarantee and social welfare.
“I keep promises I make, and, unlike others, I don’t make jumlas (rhetoric). Has the Kanyashree scheme stopped? It won’t, ever,” she said in oblique reference to the BJP’s stand on industrialisation in the state.
Reminiscing her days of agitation against the erstwhile Left Front government’s land acquisition for the Tata Motors small car factory, Banerjee called Singur her “favourite place”.
“I have spent many days on the highway here between 2006 and 2008 and people from local villages brought me homemade food to support us,” she said, adding, “I fasted for 26 days at a stretch against forceful land acquisition here.” The CM announced the disbursement of the latest tranche of Rs 24,180 crore for 20 lakh additional people of the state who would receive funds for the ‘Banglar Bari’ rural housing project, taking the total number of beneficiaries to 1.32 crore families in two phases.
She also said the state has sanctioned Rs 1500 crore for the Ghatal Master Plan project to save the low lying areas of Keshpur, Debra and Ghatal in Pashchim Medinipur district from getting inundated by floodwater.
She added that Rs 500 crore has already been disbursed for the project, and work worth about Rs 300 crore is complete.
“We wrote to the Centre for 10 years for aid for Ghatal’s flood woes, but received no response. We will now build the project with our own money. We will not beg,” she said.
Expressing condolences to the families of those who “perished from anxiety due to the ongoing SIR conspiracy”, Banerjee condemned the “conspiracy to implement NRC in the garb of SIR.” “You are deleting names by conspiracy through SIR. Why can’t you have faith in people? How can EC delete two crore names to decide who is a voter and who is not? People should choose its government. Remember this is a democracy, not a dictatorship or an autocracy,” she said, also hitting out at the BJP led Centre.
Blaming the BJP for the alleged SIR-related deaths, the chief minister accused the saffron camp of manufacturing lies in the name of electoral roll clean-up.
“Bolchho jhooth, korchho loot (BJP speaks lies, engineers loot). You are standing over the bodies of so many people. We will not forgive you, you will have to answer who is responsible for these deaths and we won’t let you go scot free,” she said.
Hitting out at Modi, albeit without directly naming him, for his statement on granting classical language status to Bengali during one of his earlier visits to Bengal, Banerjee alleged the claim was far from the truth.
“Someone standing here, whose chair I respect, claimed he awarded classical language status to Bengali. I say, it’s an utter lie. You awarded that status to all classical languages, except Bengali. I sent five sacks of books to Delhi as evidence stating that Bangla should have received that status long ago. You included Bangla only because we forced you to. Neither you nor your government had done it initially. I had to build research teams to get you to do it,” the CM said.
“You thrash Bengali-speaking people in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Delhi, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. We don’t reciprocate that in Bengal,” she added, and made an indirect jibe at the PM for “speaking from a teleprompter to speak in Bengali”. PTI SMY BDC SMY NN
This report is auto-generated from PTI news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.