By IANS,
Kolkata : A day ahead of the Tata Nano rollout, West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee lambasted the state’s opposition parties Sunday, saying 6,000 people had lost a great employment opportunity as the company shifted the project to Gujarat following sustained agitation.
“Tomorrow, the Tata car will be commercially launched. This launch was supposed to be held in Kolkata. The plant had come up in Singur. It would have given employment to 6,000 people,” he said.
“Who is responsible for Nano leaving the state? How has the opposition served the interest of cultivators? Singur is now in darkness,” Bhattacharjee said at an election rally in Diamond Harbour of south 24-Parganas.
“They did not allow the factory to come up. Did Singur deserve this?” the chief minister said.
Tata Motors had originally decided to roll out Nano from Singur, a rural hamlet in Hooghly district 40 km from Kolkata, but Oct 3 last year it scrapped the project after a sustained movement on the land acquisition issue.
Bhattacharjee said the government was committed to setting up industry in Singur. “We will do it. And we will ensure that more than 6,000 people get work there.”
Attacking the Congress-Trinamool alliance in the state, Bhattacharjee said there was no guarantee that the Trinamool would not join the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance after the elections.
“Pranab Babu (state Congress president and External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee) himself has no idea which way Trinamool will be headed after the election. I ask Pranab Babu: can you prevent Trinamool from going to the BJP’s side after the polls?”
“How many times has the Trinamool gone to the BJP camp? How many times has it turned its back to the BJP? This party is devoid of any ideology,” he said.