In Bengal, where strikes are an accepted form of political dialogue, and their success has little bearing on the electoral strength of the party calling the strike, it does not quite matter if the 12-hour bandh called by the Trinamool Congress earlier this month (tacitly supported by some elements in the Congress) was a success or not. But the debate on the propriety of the state offering supposedly fertile farmland for setting up a modern industry touches upon a core issue concerning the direction of Bengal’s future economic development. In promising Tata Motors 1,000 acres of farmland at Singur — just 45 kilometres from the metropolis of Calcutta — for setting up a factory to make what can decidedly be the country’s most popular car, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the state’s reformist chief minister, has invited a public discourse on Bengal’s future identity. Will Bengal continue to live in its paddy fields? Or, should it accept the more unbucolic pursuit of industrialization without regrets?

It is an urgent issue that involves not merely the Trinamool Congress, which, after the electoral reverses this year, is naturally tempted to refurbish its image at any cost. The chief minister’s decision to make room for modern industry amidst a multi-crop farming area has carried the debate into his own government. Hoarding spaces have been hired in Calcutta to announce that agriculture is the state’s “foundation” (bhitti) while industry is its “future” (bhabishyat). How reliable is agriculture as the state’s foundation? If it is wobbly already, is it advisable to plan an industrial edifice on it?

Unfortunately, agriculture is Bengal’s bane, not its boon. The state has three times more density of population than the country. In a highly congested place, the worst thing one can do is farming. And that is why people in Bengal are moving away from agriculture in droves. Between 1991 and 2001, the share of agricultural workers, including the marginal, to total workers in rural Bengal dropped sharply from 70.67 per cent to 58.60 per cent (Census 2001). The drop is three times sharper than that between 1981 and 1991. While the occupational profile of the state is changing dramatically, the surplus workforce from land, denied industrial jobs due to the lack of quality education and absence of worthwhile industrial projects, is queuing up for ill-paid services, like rickshaw- pulling or selling lottery tickets. Agriculture as the state’s foundation has sunk long ago, and the economy is showing signs of caving in. Bengal, like many parts of India, is undergoing a rapid demographic transition. But vote-seeking politicians tend to promote a sort of hysteria about agriculture. Senior officials of the Central government do not fail in their public addresses to pay homage to the ‘sacred’ ties that bind man to land. The West Bengal government hoarding is no exception.

Nothing can be more unproductive than being a farmer, even at the so-called “rice bowl” of Singur. It records an annual harvest of 2,450 kg of rice per hectare. The marginal farmer of Singur, who outnumbers the small farmer by seven to one, is unlikely to hold more than one hectare (about 4.5 bighas). His annual yield of 2,450 kilogrammes fetches, at the most recent Katwa mandi rate, no more than Rs 28,463. But, wait! That is his gross revenue. Given the costs, which is 55 per cent of the gross as an average, it is just about Rs 12,000 a year, or Rs 1,000 a month. Assuming that the land supports a family of five, each member earns Rs 6.66 a day. It is a lot less than today’s ‘poverty line’, estimated at Rs 11 a day, which, as Brinda Karat, CPI(M) politburo member and Rajya Sabha member elected from West Bengal, has very correctly termed as the “destitution line.”

The owner of the land has obviously locked away his wealth. The West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation is offering various prices for land — ranging from Rs 1 lakh per bigha to Rs 2 lakh, depending on the location. Averaging it at Rs 1.5 lakh, the owner can expect to get Rs 6.75 lakh. At an interest rate of 8 per cent on fixed deposits, it should yield a safe and idle income of Rs 54,000 annually, or Rs 4,500 a month. For each family member, it is 2.5 times Karat’s ‘destitution line’. So, which is a better alternative for the marginal farmer? To protect his sacred link with land, or to go laughing to the nearest branch of the nationalized bank? The second option is obviously better. The other option is nothing short of slow death.

But then why are so many politicians — including a former mayor of Calcutta who has always represented ‘boroughs’ and never a ‘county’—chasing a very bad economic choice? The answer lies in the census data for Hooghly district. It records 317,022 big, small and marginal farmers, against 463,529 agricultural labourers and tenant farmers. Hence, the ratio of men who have land to sell, to those who haven’t, is 3:4 for the district. Presumably, it is not much different at the Singur block. It is a classic struggle between the haves and the have-nots, if land is regarded as the only asset worth having in rural society. Ironically, it is the Marxists’ turn to be on the other side of the picket fence instead of their usual position.

In rural Haryana and Punjab, too, workers are moving away from agricultural to non-agricultural pursuits. But the situation there is different from Bengal. The voice of land-owners in the two states drowns that of landless labourers and tenant farmers. Therefore, the opposition to special economic zones building up in the north is more by way of haggling for a better price than for dear life, as the battle over Singur appears to be. In Bengal, on the other hand, those who are resisting land transfer have their daily wages at stake. And that is where politicians smell an opportunity. They know the plight of farm workers who have no alternative. Thanks to the systematic destruction of quality school education by politicizing the teaching community, the Left Front has left millions of farm workers unemployable in any industry.

Even though the Tatas have promised to provide technical training to children of families who have offered land, its benefit, if at all, can hardly reach the landless peasantry. And for those who cherish dreams about modern automobile workshops humming with workers, like Detroit in the early years of Ford, it may be worthwhile to pay a brief visit to the Maruti factory in Gurgaon. Only three or four people man a gigantic paint or body shop, with cars-in-the-making being driven in robotic silence on a maze of rails hugging the ceiling. The Tata project, designed for mass production of cheap cars, should be even more automated than other carmakers.

It has not been easy for any country to bring down the share of population in agriculture. As early as 1811, Britain’s agricultural population stood at 38 per cent (which is a lot less than India’s 60 per cent in 2001). But it took the country 90 years to push it down to 17 per cent, and another 90 years to bring it to today’s level of a little over two per cent. So the great leap forward from agriculture to industry, as promised in the state government hoarding, may remain an acrobatic miracle. Unless the state follows the land of the “Great Leap Forward” — China, which has halved the percentage share of its agricultural population from 80 per cent to 40 per cent in just 50 years. It has also shown a similar speed —higher than that of the West — in reducing the gap between skilled and unskilled workers by rapid spread of education. Nine-year compulsory education has been universalized in China.

Labour-heavy agriculture is a dying business, or a ‘sunset industry’, to use the modern parlance. It became so in Europe in the 19th century, and so it is in most of Asia, including Bengal. Singur is not to be lauded as a ‘rice bowl’, but should be discarded as the dust bowl. It is worse than the neighbouring rust belt of dying industries along the Hooghly river, for the people there may have lost their jobs but they had an opportunity to give their children education, and the skills that come with it. If Bhattacharjee were Stalin, and not a bhadralok, he would have sent the state’s past education ministers to the gulag.