A project larger than the Nano that Bengal lost to Gujarat is going waste because the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government is bungling in Bantala after slipping in Singur.

At 1,200 acres, the Calcutta Leather Complex — located around 14km from Science City — was supposed to be the world’s largest.

The cumulative capital of around Rs 1,500 crore was 50 per cent more than the initial investment earmarked for the Nano factory.

So, what has gone wrong?

According to a source in the leather industry, each of the stakeholders is to blame for the failure of the project.

Metro took a tour of the complex, now drowned in slush and stench, to find out what ails the facility.

PLANNING

Only 219 of the 538 registered tanneries have shifted to Bantala. The rest refuse to do so because it doesn’t make sense for them to shift to a location where the facilities don’t measure up to what they had been promised.

“The leather complex is the victim of sheer bad planning. Nothing has been executed in a planned manner,” says a tannery owner.

The Central Leather Research Institute had recommended that the Calcutta-Basanti highway, which leads to the leather complex, be widened to four lanes. It had also suggested that a separate road be laid for vehicles ferrying raw animal hide to the complex to prevent air pollution along the EM Bypass.

None of these recommendations was adhered to.

“A huge open space is not enough for a world-class leather complex. Planning and systematic execution is required to make such a huge facility workable,” says Ramesh Juneja, the president of the Calcutta Leather Complex Tanners’ Association.

INFRASTRUCTURE

The twin objectives mentioned in the 1995 agreement between the government and the developer of the complex, ML Dalmiya & Company, were to relocate tanneries from the city to a controlled environment and develop an export-oriented leather township that would compete with the ones in Kanpur and Chennai.

Tannery owner Tanvir Ehtasham now laughs at the mere suggestion of a “world-class facility” in Bantala. “Leave alone world-class infrastructure, one can’t even have a landline phone there because BSNL hasn’t set up any equipment. The complex plunges into darkness every night because there are no lights. It is ridiculous to even suggest that this will be a state-of-the-art facility.”