What do you mean, no Plan B?

Finally, the long unhappy saga of Singur comes to an end. The attempt by the West Bengal Government to reignite industrial investment in the state has ended. The promise made by the Tatas to the State could not be carried out. The objective of Mamata Banerjee has been achieved - she has managed to hog the media limelight for all the wrong reasons, and come out looking like Jhansi ki Raani to her constituents.

This is not surprising - not surprising at all, given the way the whole thing started. The WB government bulldozed their way through all local opposition, very much like the comrades in the old USSR used to, and today's China are wont to do. But India is a democracy - and in a democracy, winning hearts and minds is a more effective way of implementing decisions than diktat, read "coercion". The worm does have an nasty of habit of turning just when you think it's gone away. This time, thanks to Mamata, the worm did turn and nastily too.

So, that's that. The Tata Group has dropped a packet on Singur, and will have to invest another packet in a new plant somewhere else, and hit the market with Nano some months behind schedule.

The reds in WBengal have come out of this looking definitely second class. Ultimately, it's their ham-handedness which created the problem which saw the Tatas exit Singur.

There are two things which I find really interesting:

* Mr Ratan Tata's comment some days ago that there's no Plan B to Singur. As a shareholder, I certainly have the right to ask the Chairman why there's no Plan B. The investment is a significant sum of money, the issues about Singur have been front page news since the beginning, and the whole journey has been rocky from the start. But, the Chairman and his Board did not feel it necessary to have a Plan B?
* Mr Mukesh Advani, not normally an ally of the Tatas, came out in support of the Nano project in Singur, pretty loud and clear. Stranger things have happened, but I can't of many offhand.


I shall watch how things progress on the second front. Perhaps tete-a-tetes between M/s Tata and Ambani are not beyond the realms of possibility even now.