Bulldozing people

The decade of 2000 has become remark-able for eviction for development projects in West Bengal. The march of the bulldozers started in 2001, when the Left Front government, led by Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, took initiatives to evict squatters beside the Tolly's Nullah canal in south Kolkata. Since then, the list has lengthened: Beliaghata, Lake Gardens, Bagbazar, Bellilious Road, Singur, Nandigram...
The Tolly's Nullah eviction programme was taken up ostensibly to facilitate extension of the Metro Railway from Tollygunge to Garia in the south.This eviction was a landmark in the political history of the Left movement in West Bengal. Once, the urban base of the Left was mainly among these squatters and refugees who had settled on the filthy, forsaken banks of the city's drainage canals such as Tolly's Nullah.
The Left parties had always fought for their legal entitlement of land. But ruling the state for decades, they realised that in order to pursue the development model set up by the World Bank-IMF-ADB regime, those who did not have legal entitlement of their lands had to be evicted, even without proper rehabilitation.
More than 1,100 families were evicted from the canalside by a massive show of strength by the paramilitary and police forces, starting September 22, 2001. Another remarkable eviction drive took place successfully in Beliaghata canalside on December 10, International Human Rights Day, 2002. A fire burnt thousands of shanties within an hour.
Meanwhile, the authorities decided on eviction of the rail colonies beside the tracks between the Ballygunge and Tolly-gunge stations on the south suburban line, a long stretch where an estimated 20,000 people lived.
The immediate instigation came from a high court ruling to clear the settlement, whose inhabitants, argued a so-called environmentalist forum, were polluting the waters of the local lake, Rabindra Sarovar. Neither the court nor the environmentalists, however, took any pains to find out why the settlers had to live for five-six decades without proper sanitation arrangements and civic amenities. After stiff resistance from settlers in May 2002, the colony was crushed on December 15, 2005.
Massive displacement also took place in the Rajarhat area in the north-west of the city, where a satellite township is coming up, filling waterbodies and farmlands. Around 750,000 people lost their two- and three-cropped land.
In Tolly's Nullah, only 168 families were compensated, albeit poorly, as they owed allegiance to one of the constituents of the ruling front. Another 700-odd families got no rehabilitation. As for the quality of rehabilitation, the 168 families were resettled near Patuli on the southern fringe of the city under Valmiki-Ambedkar Avas Yojana, with only the central but not the state government contributing its share.
The families formed a women's cooperative to get a bank loan. Now, they pay instalments every month, even while losing previous earning opportunities.
No comprehensive rehabilitation plan has been made for squatters from other canalsides in Belia-ghata and Bagbazar. Strong resistance from rail colony squatters at Lake Gardens forced the government to negotiate with them. About 2,000 families were asked to resettle at Nonadanga on the eastern fringe of the city. The area was hardly accessible. Only around 280 families went there, as there was no arrangement for living. Others rented dingy rooms far from Lake Gardens.
Now, the state government has announ-ced that it is going to acquire more than 40,000 acres of land for various development projects within a year, indicating that the displacement is likely to continue more forcefully in the time to come.
When the journey of the bulldozers started with Tolly's Nullah, the resistance from the side of squatters was very weak and the support of middle-class Calcuttans for their eviction was very strong.
Though the opposition parties, the parliamentary ones and the far Left, have been able to raise the pitch of protest in the case of Singur (where a little less than 1,000 acres of multi-crop land is being taken away to make way for a private automobile factory) and Nandigram, there is hardly any challenge to the overall model of 'development' which calls for such displacement.