Mamata Banerjee to kick off giving possession to farmers from Thursday

SINGUR: More than seven weeks have passed since the Supreme Court set a 12-week deadline for the Bengal government to return land to the Singur farmers in "original form".

Although Mamata Banerjee will kick off giving possession to the farmers from Thursday, physical transfer of the entire property seems to be a Herculean task.

A 3,500-strong workforce, some 200 trucks, 60 hydras, 80 earth movers and 25 dumpers have been deployed at the site which was supposed to churn out the world's cheapest small car.

The chief minister has put several government departments, Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC), Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority (KMDA) and Hooghly River Bridge Commissioner (HRBC) to meet the Singur deadline. Even though Mamata has put her full strength to comply with the apex court deadline, the district administration admits it to be a "mammoth" task.

"Around 7,300 land deeds (parchas) of 10,000 have been distributed to the farmers, but giving physical possession is definitely not an immediate probability," a land official told ET, refusing to be quoted.

Large swathes of the 997-acre land that the Tatas had bought from the erstwhile Left Front government are unarable.

The plot has 66 buildings, 32 of these fully built and 24 under construction. It also has 25 km of concrete road, a power sub-station and around 16 km of drainage network.

"We have almost cleared and cleaned the land where there was no concrete construction. In some places, there are underground constructions too. But, a huge workforce has been deployed," said Sanjay Bansal, district magistrate of Hooghly.

The Bengal government, which is grappling with a Rs 3-lakh-crore outstanding debt as on March 2016, has planned to bring in people working under the MGNREGA to speed up work at Singur.

"We need special approval from the authorities concerned for making people work under the national rural job scheme," a senior official said.

Singur sits on a highly fertile green zone.The land where the Tatas were setting up their Nano car factory is believed to have lost its agricultural character because of the piling work. The original soil bed has gone at least six feet under the existing layer of soil.

"Re-transformation of the Singur land is an extremely difficult and expensive proposition. The soil pores of filling material are really small and they cannot retain moisture. Permeability of the land is really low. Vegetable cropping is not possible on this land till it gets back its original character," said Partha Pratim Biswas, professor of construction engineering at Jadavpur University.