Calcutta, May 3: The scrapping of the Nano project in Singur and derailment of industrialisation today resurfaced as major poll planks for the CPM and its allies in the Calcutta civic polls.

“Industrialisation.... is the guarantee for the city’s development. No city can develop with the huge burden of jobless youths,’’ says the Left Front manifesto for the city.

Its manifesto for the 80 other civic bodies going to the polls with the Calcutta Municipal Corporation on May 30 had not even mentioned the word industrialisation, a political hot potato after successive poll debacles since Singur and Nandigram.

But today’s stress on the need for industry and the blame on Trinamul for Nano’s exit indicated a different assessment of the city’s mood. “The decision to set up the car unit was not wrong. It was mainly Trinamul which obstructed it,’’ CPM state secretary and front chief Biman Bose said.

Even if the manifesto kept mum on Nandigram, a sore point within the front, the revival of the Singur issue underlined the CPM’s hope of deflating Mamata Banerjee’s development plank as railway minister. “The Nano is now stockpiled in the rail minister’s godown (auto hub in Shalimar) while Singur is left with a haunted structure (of the car factory). What dream of development will Calcuttans have while voting?’’ the manifesto asks.

CPM leaders admitted that the Nano had failed to arrest the erosion in its middle-class support base in the Lok Sabha elections last May and the Assembly bypolls after that. But recent victories of the SFI in college and university polls have made them hopeful of winning over young and educated but jobless voters.