Kolkata’s lucrative west

Sometime back, I wrote how away from the din of Singur and Nadigram agitations, a new amader-dabi-mante-hobe style of ‘struggle’ was brewing up at Salim-Ciputra promoted Kolkata West International City (KWIC) – this one to protest the naming, Kolkata West for the project (see my post, Kolkata West is but Howrah).

Lest you think this is a frivolous protest, think again. KWIC, for good measure, is a Howrah township, off NH-6 near Howrah-Amta Road. But as everyone knows, Kolkata has better market value than Howrah, and so Salim-Ciputra cannot be blamed because after all they’ve to sell KWIC to prospective buyers. No emotion there, only hard calculation.

Now comes the Dankuni township. If its name is anything but Kolkata ‘something’ – for this too lies west of Kolkata, albeit in Hooghly district – then KWIC’s future residents may have a cause to feel upset. But then it’s not how they feel that is important, for the onus is squarely on promoters’ shoulders to see that the project goes through without any hiccup.

The Dankuni township, to be built by a consortium led by Delhi-based DLF group and including Singapore’s Sentosa Group and HDFC, is a mammoth affair involving an investment of Rs.33,000 crore over 10 years, stated to be the largest public-private partnership project in the country thus far. It’ll come up on 4870 acres of land, about 5 times the area of upcoming Singur car factory, of which 1862 acres will be residential area. See this TT news. [DLF Square Tower in Gurgaon (right): image source]

Since the Dankuni project will mean eviction of about 600 families (22 in 1644-acre first phase), will this too face similar protests like Singur? It will without doubt, for, to the exclusion of everything else, the ‘save-land’ issue is now the only weapon in the arsenal of opposition parties in Bengal today.

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