Salboni, April 3: Looking wistfully at the wall that surrounds the sprawling 4,284-acre land in West Midnapore's Salboni, stationery shop owner Goutam Mandal said: " Mone hoi aager sorkar thakle kaaj hoye jeto (I think had the previous government been there, the work would have been done)."

This is the refrain in Kulfeni, the village nearest to Sajjan Jindal's mega industrial venture in Bengal, and hamlets around it.

If pent-up dissatisfaction gets reflected in the first phase of the Assembly polls in this region tomorrow, it may cause a few flutters in the Trinamul camp.

Many believe that Trinamul has only itself to blame for the stutter in this rural belt aspiring to develop into an industrial zone.

After several false starts in the past decade, the Mumbai-based JSW Group has finally begun work on the plot but the proposed plant will be a shadow of the original plan.

Instead of a 10 million-tonne steel plant and a 1,320-mega watt power plant for Rs 35,000 crore, Jindal is building a 2.4 million-tonne cement factory costing Rs 1,000 crore.

"Only a handful of local people have got jobs (at the site), that too as daily labourers. The Jindal plant was not required for this. We would have got such jobs anyway in Midnapore or Kharagpur," said Parameshwar Mahato of Ashnasuli village.

His hopes of getting a better job were dashed in December 2014 when JSW officially put the project "on hold" indefinitely.

The steel commodity market had shrunk and there was countrywide uncertainty in the mining sector, especially coal and iron ore, which are the two crucial raw materials to manufacture steel.

But the situation had been different when Trinamul stormed to power in May 2011. A few months later, Jindal had met chief minister Mamata Banerjee at Writers' Buildings to dispel doubts about the project and assure that work would begin soon.

But the new government appeared to look at JSW with suspicion, presumably because the project was conceived when the Left was in power. Several bureaucratic hurdles cropped up and the project never got going.

Many in Salboni like Bimal Chalak were looking to cash in on the economic development that would have happened in the area had the original project materialised.

"I am entitled to a job at the plant site because I gave land for the project. But I never wanted to work in the factory. An officer who had worked at the project site had also encouraged me by saying why should I be a factory hand when I could become an entrepreneur and earn much more," Chalak said.

Before JSW had built a guesthouse at the site, Chalak used to earn between Rs 15,000 and Rs 20,000 a month by renting out a room of his house, opposite the upcoming factory, to visiting officials and running a canteen.

Now that the guesthouse has come up and Petron Engineering, which JSW has hired for civil work at the site, has set up a canteen and a grocery shop, the services of Chalak and the others like him are no longer required.