As the legal battle continues over the Singur Land Rehabilitation and Development Act, 2011, between the Tata Motors and the West Bengal government at the Calcutta high court, the government on Sunday started distribution of application forms among the “unwilling” farmers at Singur in its bid to return the land to them.
Around 3,000 forms had been distributed till late Sunday afternoon. Trinamul Congress MLA from Singur Rabindranath Bhattacharjee supervised the distribution process at the BDO office in Singur. Meanwhile, the state government will table the rules of the Singur Land Rehabilitation and Development Act, 2011, in the Assembly on Monday.
“Though the government has set a time-frame of 30 days to distribute and receive the duly-filled application forms from June 23, we want to complete the entire thing in three days. So far, many unwilling farmers who want to get back their land have collected the forms and few of them have also submitted the duly-filled forms,” Mr Bhattacharjee said.
The local people’s representatives have also distributed few forms to the unwilling farmers. The Singur Krishi Jomi Raksha Committee has set up many camps in Singur to assist the farmers in filling up the forms.
The officials will have to scrutinise every duly-filled forms once they receive those. “It will be a challenging task as many plots involve ownership disputes. According to our preliminary study, the number of unwilling farmers at Singur is 2,221 and in addition, there is dispute over the ownership of 218 plots. However, these figures may be revised,” a land and land reforms department official informed. Meanwhile, it has been learnt that the survey of the entire land (997.11 acres) to identify the portion which will be returned to the unwilling farmers will not start till the scrutiny of all the submitted forms is over.