Bengal CM Suvendu Adhikari threatens jail for factory blockades, confirms Singur investment talks with Ashok Leyland

Singur, a farming town in West Bengal’s Hooghly district, just outside Kolkata, lost its car plant in 2008 to a farmers’ revolt. Eighteen years later, a chief minister who rose in that era’s land-protest politics is threatening jail for anyone who halts a factory. “Those who will try to do so will be put in jail,” Suvendu Adhikari said on Thursday, launching Bengal’s new industrial policy. He promised action within 15 minutes of a complaint being registered.

Then came the surprise. Asked about Singur, the site of the abandoned Tata Nano project, Adhikari said the government had held preliminary talks with Ashok Leyland. “We will do something there,” he said. But he ruled out a quick headline: no MoU signed just for publicity. In a state where announcements have often outlived the projects behind them, that restraint was itself a statement.

How Singur got here

The story starts in 2006. The Left Front, fresh from a landslide win, wanted to end Bengal's decades-long industrial decline. Tata Motors was invited to build its small car plant at Singur in Hooghly. The company says it came at the invitation of the West Bengal Government, to revitalise the state's automotive industry. Tata said the project would generate over 10,000 direct and indirect jobs.

The land was the problem. Around a thousand acres of fertile, multi-crop farmland had been acquired, and many farmers who felt they had been pushed off their land protested. Mamata Banerjee's agitation turned Singur into the central political fight of the state. Adhikari, then a young Trinamool leader, rose with that wave. His own biography notes that in 2007 he spearheaded the anti-land acquisition movement in the neighbouring Nandigram. The two movements together shaped the politics that eventually ended 34 years of Left rule.

On October 3, 2008, the curtain came down on the Nano project in West Bengal. Tata moved production to Sanand in Gujarat. Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa and Gujarat had all offered alternative locations if Tata chose to leave, and Gujarat won. Tata's position was that it had not abandoned the site but was driven out by escalating violence.

The legal aftermath took years. In 2011 the new Trinamool government legislated to take the land back. In 2016, the Supreme Court cancelled the original acquisition, and farming resumed on part of the land. For years the site was a symbol of what the state had lost, and by 2018 reporters were describing a decade-old wasteland. Even the legal ledger stayed open until recently: in 2023, Tata Motors was awarded ₹765.78 crore with interest by an arbitral tribunal against the state industrial development corporation.

Why Ashok Leyland, and why now

Ashok Leyland is the flagship of the Hinduja Group and one of India's biggest commercial vehicle makers. Its manufacturing is concentrated in the south; its LCV range, for example, is built at its Hosur plant. The company has repeatedly called Eastern India a key market, including the opening of a fifth LCV dealership in West Bengal in late 2024. A plant near Kolkata would put it closer to eastern customers and ports. The economics are plausible. Whether the company sees them the same way is what talks will need to establish.

The timing fits the policy launch. The new policy offers assistance of up to 120 per cent of eligible investment in plant and machinery, with priority for sectors including electric vehicles and shipbuilding. The government has also said it will fold the 2013 land acquisition law and land pooling into the policy. The pitch is that it will neither use force against farmers nor leave industrialists to arrange land themselves.

The caveats

Three things deserve scrutiny. First, the land. Singur's plot is a patchwork after the 2016 verdict, part returned to farmers and part held by the state, and any large site would need consolidation. Second, trust. The new policy excludes an estimated ₹50,000 crore backlog of industrial incentives promised under previous regimes, which investors will notice. Third, history: Bengal has seen many announced intentions that never turned into factories.

Supporters will say a leader who understands the farmers' anger is best placed to broker a land deal that doesn't repeat 2006. Critics will say a politician who built his career opposing this very acquisition should not be handed the credit, or the benefit of the doubt, for reversing the narrative. Both views will be tested by what follows.

For now, the story of Singur's second chapter has one verified line: talks, at a preliminary stage. The next test is a name, an acreage, an investment figure and a start date. Until then, the shed-and-scrap landscape of Singur stands as it did, a reminder that in Bengal, announcements are cheap and factories are not.