It is Friday 3 October 2008, on the eve of the Durga Puja holiday. Ratan Tata says that his company is leaving Singur, the farmland about 30 km north of Kolkata, where Tata Motors has been building a plant for its smallest car. He says that if somebody puts a gun to your head, they must either pull the trigger or take the gun away, because he will not move his head. Then he says that Mamata Banerjee, the opposition leader who has led the protests, has pulled the trigger.
Work on the plant has been stopped since 2 September. A mediation by the state’s Governor failed on 7 September.
2006
State acquires 997 acres for Tata Motors
4 Dec 2006 · Kolkata
Mamata Banerjee begins a 25-day hunger strike
14 Mar 2007 · Nandigram
Police firing kills at least 14 villagers
2 Sep 2008
Tata Motors suspends work
3 Oct 2008 · Kolkata
Tata announces exit from Singur
20 May 2011 · Kolkata
Banerjee sworn in, ending 34 years of Left Front rule
31 Aug 2016
Supreme Court quashes the acquisition; land to go back to its 9,117 owners
2019
About 30% of the returned land cultivable, by one report
30 Oct 2023
Arbitral award of ₹765.78 crore to Tata Motors, with interest
Jun 2026
New government explores talks to bring Tata back; nothing signed
THE CAR
10 Jan 2008 · Delhi
Unveiled at ₹1 lakh before tax and delivery (about $2,500)
FY 2011–12
Sales peak at 74,527
Jun 2018
One Nano produced in the month
7 Oct 2008
Nano plant announced; with its supplier park, about 1,100 acres
2 Jun 2010
Plant inaugurated
Tata left Singur on 3 October 2008 and announced Sanand four days later. Singur's land took eight more years to go back.
Dates and figures as given in the text. The route is schematic, not a map. The car's own milestones sit between the two places because they belong to neither plant.
Source: Press reports, court records and Tata Motors; see Notes
See the numbers
| Date | Place | Event | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2006 | Singur | State acquires 997 acres for Tata Motors under the Land Acquisition Act, 1894 | Ghatak, Mitra, Mookherjee and Nath; Wikipedia, Tata Nano Singur controversy |
| 4 Dec 2006 | Kolkata | Mamata Banerjee begins a 25-day hunger strike | The Daily Star |
| 14 Mar 2007 | Nandigram | Police firing kills at least 14 villagers | Wikipedia, Nandigram violence |
| 10 Jan 2008 | Delhi | Nano unveiled at ₹1 lakh before tax and delivery (about $2,500) | The Tribune |
| 2 Sep 2008 | Singur | Tata Motors suspends work | IndustryWeek |
| 3 Oct 2008 | Kolkata | Tata announces exit from Singur | Al Jazeera; Outlook |
| 7 Oct 2008 | Sanand | Tata announces a Nano plant at Sanand; plant and supplier park on about 1,100 acres | Wikipedia, Tata Nano Singur controversy; Tata Motors press kit (Land Matrix) |
| 2 Jun 2010 | Sanand | Plant inaugurated | Tata Motors press kit (Land Matrix) |
| 20 May 2011 | Kolkata | Mamata Banerjee sworn in as chief minister, ending 34 years of Left Front rule | Governance Now |
| FY 2011–12 | India | Nano sales peak at 74,527 | Business Today |
| 31 Aug 2016 | Singur | Supreme Court quashes the acquisition; land to go back to its 9,117 owners within 12 weeks | Autocar Professional; Wikipedia, Tata Nano Singur controversy |
| Jun 2018 | India | One Nano produced in the month | Wikipedia, Tata Nano; CarAdvice |
| 2019 | Singur | About 30 percent of the returned land cultivable, by one newspaper's account | The Pioneer |
| 30 Oct 2023 | Arbitration | Award of ₹765.78 crore (about 7.7 billion rupees) to Tata Motors from WBIDC, with 11% a year from 1 Sep 2016 | Business Today; Outlook Business |
| Jun 2026 | Singur | New BJP state government explores talks to bring Tata back; nothing signed | Business Today |
Four days later, on 7 October, Tata announces a new site at Sanand in Gujarat. Business Today reports that Gujarat’s government had prepared a pitch and sent Ratan Tata a one-word welcome text. It also reports that the first car came off the new line in 14 months, against the 28 months Singur had been in the works. That is the story as it is usually told: a text message, a rival state, a race. This chapter asks what the two lines at the top of that story, Singur and Sanand, say about how two countries turn a field into a factory.
The car
The car was the Nano. Tata unveiled it in Delhi on 10 January 2008, aiming at a price of 100,000 rupees, about $2,500. It was formally launched in Mumbai on 23 March 2009, with a starting price of 100,000 rupees. Tata Motors later called it loss-making, with low volumes. Keep that in mind: the argument over what Singur cost depends on it.
Singur
Singur belongs to a decade in which India was trying to copy China’s zones. Parliament passed the Special Economic Zones Act in 2005. The Economic Survey of 2006–07 said that India’s earlier export-zone experiment, 11 zones since 1965, had been far from a success, while China and the countries of south-east Asia had used zones successfully. A zone needs land in one piece, and a piece of land in India has owners.
Tata Motors announced the Singur plant in May 2006, and the state of West Bengal acquired 997 acres for it under the emergency clause of its land-acquisition law. The law was the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, a colonial statute that the Indian state had kept. Construction began on 21 January 2007.
Banerjee, then in opposition, began a fast against the siting on 4 December 2006. It lasted about 25 days. She broke it late on 28 December, after a letter from the Prime Minister reached her through the Governor’s office, with the President voicing serious concern for her health; that same day the state’s chief minister had sent an emissary with an invitation to talks.
Eleven weeks later, on 14 March 2007, police opened fire at Nandigram, elsewhere in West Bengal, where villagers were resisting a planned chemical hub. At least 14 people were killed and about 70 injured. The state later admitted in an affidavit that police fired without the mandatory magisterial order. After Nandigram, a regional dispute became a national one in the press.
The farmers’ case is usually told as a case about greed or politics. A careful study of it makes the argument in a different place. Maitreesh Ghatak and his co-authors studied the Singur villages and found that, on average, the compensation on offer was close to market value. The trouble lay in the records. High-grade land that bore several crops a year had often been entered in the registers as poorer land, so the owners of the best fields were offered too little, and the underpaid were the likeliest to refuse. The same study found that incomes fell for owner-cultivators and tenants, and that most households would have preferred non-cash compensation.
What came back
The farmers won, slowly. The state government that came to power afterwards passed a law in 2011 to reclaim the land. On 31 August 2016 the Supreme Court quashed the 2006 acquisition and ordered the 997 acres returned to the farmers. The state handed land back to farmers about 50 days after the ruling. The factory had been built for a car that was never made there.
The farmers, then, had the law on their side, and the law came ten years too late for the car. That is the first half of the chapter’s argument.
The land question that Singur reopened in 2006 had been answered once before, in different ways, in the first years after each country’s independence or revolution.
In China, the Agrarian Reform Law was promulgated on 30 June 1950. According to the national statistics bureau’s later table, landlords were 3.79 percent of rural households in 1950 and owned 38.26 percent of the cultivated land; by 1954 they owned 2.2 percent. By May 1952, 430 million people, 88 percent of the rural population, had completed the reform. The historian Frank Dikötter, quoted in a teaching exhibit, holds that the dead of the land and suppression campaigns of 1947 to 1952 were unlikely to number fewer than 1.5 to 2 million.
In India, a different path ran through Parliament and the courts. Nehru moved the First Amendment on 10 May 1951 and Parliament enacted it on 18 June; among other things it validated the laws abolishing the zamindari estates. On 18 April 1951, before the amendment was moved, Vinoba Bhave asked for land as a gift for the landless at Pochampally; the movement collected large gifts but had lost momentum by the 1960s.
What the reforms did is argued over. Using panel data on the sixteen main states from 1958 to 1992, Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess found land-reform legislation associated with poverty reduction. Abhijit Banerjee and Lakshmi Iyer found that areas where landlords had historically held proprietary rights had significantly lower agricultural investment and productivity after independence.
Where the farmer could not say no
In China the same dispute took a different form. As the Landesa report describes it, urban land belongs to the state and rural land to the village collective, and only the state can turn the second into the first. The Shenzhen auction of 1987, the seventeen minutes told in chapter 8, showed that a right to use land could be sold even though the land itself stayed public; on 12 April 1988 the National People’s Congress amended the constitution so that this right could be transferred according to law. The tax-sharing reform of 1 January 1994 lifted the centre’s share of revenue from 22 percent to 55.7 percent, but left pensions, welfare and local services with local governments. Whether that split caused the later dependence on land sales is disputed. One study argues that after the reform local revenue did not plunge, and that local governments lacked the capacity to build the institutions that land revenue needs.
What is not disputed is what the farmer received. In mid-2011 the land-rights group Landesa, with China Renmin University and Michigan State University, surveyed 1,791 rural households in 17 provinces that together hold an estimated three quarters of China’s rural population. Of the villages, 43.1 percent had seen land taken for non-farm use since the late 1990s. In 77.5 percent of cases the farmers got some compensation; in 9.8 percent they were promised it and did not receive it; and in 12.7 percent they were neither promised nor paid. The mean compensation was 18,739 yuan a mu, about $17,850 an acre. The mean price the authorities themselves received was 778,000 yuan a mu, or about $740,000 an acre, mostly in commercial projects.
2021 peak: 8.7 trillion, about 30% of total local revenue
2025: 4.15 trillion, 52% below the peak
Selling land became a mainstay of China's city budgets, then fell by half
Local governments' revenue from selling land-use rights, in trillion yuan, for the years shown. Years without a stem are not plotted, and nothing is drawn between them.
Source: Ministry of Finance figures via PIIE, Yicai, Caixin, The Paper, Yicai Global and China News Service
See the numbers
| Year | Land-sale revenue (trillion yuan) | Note | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | 0.04 | about 40 billion yuan | Yicai |
| 2012 | 2.7 | about 20% of total local revenue | PIIE |
| 2018 | 6.51 | record at the time | Yicai; Caixin |
| 2020 | 8.41 | The Paper (Ministry of Finance) | |
| 2021 | 8.71 | peak; about 30% of total local revenue | PIIE; Yicai |
| 2022 | 6.7 | PIIE | |
| 2023 | 5.8 | PIIE | |
| 2024 | 4.87 | Yicai Global (Ministry of Finance) | |
| 2025 | 4.15 | 52% below the 2021 peak | China News Service (Ministry of Finance) |
Divide one by the other and the gap is a little over forty times. Dissatisfied farmers outnumbered the satisfied by two to one, and 17.8 percent of the cases involved forceful evictions.
Farmland taken, 2011 survey (US$ per acre)
Paid to farmers17,850
Received by local authorities740,000
41×as much
Means for 1,791 households in 17 provinces; the high figure is mostly commercial projects.
Land prices, 2019 (yuan per square metre)
Industrial304
Residential3,619
12×the price
Local authorities paid farmers about a fortieth of what they received for the land, and sold land to factories at about a twelfth of the price of land for housing
Two separate comparisons, each on its own scale. The multiples are computed from the figures shown.
Source: Landesa, 17-province survey (2011); He, Nelson, Su, Zhang and Zhang, Becker Friedman Institute working paper
See the numbers
| Comparison | Lower | Higher | Unit | Multiple | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Farmland, 2011: paid to farmers vs received by local authorities | 17,850 | 740,000 | US$ per acre | ≈41× | Landesa 2011 survey |
| Land prices, 2019: industrial vs residential | 304 | 3,619 | yuan per m² | ≈12× | He, Nelson, Su, Zhang and Zhang (BFI) |
Landesa’s other finding was about the paper. Only 56.8 percent of households had been issued the contract that is supposed to record their land right, and only 20.9 percent of those contracts held all the information the law requires. In a separate survey of townships where local authorities had consolidated farmers’ house plots or moved them into town, 57.2 percent of the affected farmers were left with no land to farm. Only 21.8 percent got urban residence registration and 13.9 percent urban social security cover.
Women were often missing from the paper altogether: only 17.1 percent of the contracts that existed carried a woman’s name, though the law gives women equal land rights.
The conflict was not hidden. A BBC report of March 2006 estimated that 100 to 150 million peasants had left their villages, while cities had consumed 16 million acres of farmland in twenty years. On 6 December 2005 armed police fired on villagers at Dongzhou, in Guangdong, who had protested over little or no compensation for land taken for a power plant; the government said three died and residents said up to 20. In November 2006 thousands of villagers at Sanzhou, also in Guangdong, blockaded a warehouse built on land they said had been illegally seized, and police used tear gas. In December 2011 some 20,000 villagers at Wukan drove their local government and police out of the village after months of protest over land sales; one correspondent noted that land acquisition was seen as the biggest driver of the 180,000-plus “mass incidents” recorded each year.
The nail
One house stood in the way of a shopping mall in Chongqing. In 2004, one of 281 families on the site refused a new house or cash; by March 2007 it stood alone in the middle of a building site, and a court deadline for its owner, Wu Ping, to allow demolition ran out on Thursday 22 March. Pictures spread on the internet, and the press called the house the stubborn nail. The Chinese word for such holdouts is nail households钉子户.
Six days earlier, on 16 March 2007, the National People’s Congress had passed the Property Law, which protects private as well as public property, by 99.1 percent of 2,889 delegates. The bill had first been published in 2002, and an open letter in 2006 from the Peking University law professor Gong Xiantian arguing that it was unconstitutional had derailed the vote that year. The Landesa survey above was taken four years after it passed.
On 2 April the couple reached an agreement, accepting an apartment in the Shapingba district, and the demolition began that Monday evening. The house had held out for three years.
India’s other doors
Singur was not India’s only no. In August 2010 the Union environment ministry refused Vedanta Resources permission to mine bauxite in the Niyamgiri hills of Orissa, home of the Dongria Kondh, and accused the company of violating forest, tribal-rights and environmental laws; the state government had promised the firm the bauxite. The Economic Survey of 2006–07 had already recorded the worry in its chapter on industry. It said that the debate over the new Special Economic Zones reflected fears that farmland acquisition would displace farmers, and it listed meagre compensation among the objections.
The country’s answer was a new law, and the answer was written by the dispute. Parliament passed the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act on 29 August and 4–5 September 2013.
The new law required the consent of 80 percent of affected owners for private projects (70 percent for public-private partnerships), a social-impact assessment, rehabilitation for those displaced, and compensation of up to four times market value in rural areas and twice in urban areas.
Industry objected before it passed. At the World Economic Forum’s India Economic Forum in November 2011, leaders called the draft a setback for industrial, infrastructure and urban projects; one construction chairman said that the 80 percent consent rule could stretch land purchase indefinitely, given fragmented ownership and unclear titles. Maharashtra’s chief secretary answered that most projects sat on marginal land and that the only way to absorb the excess rural workforce was to expand manufacturing.
The first government elected after the law tried to loosen it. Its first-year reform actions, as the Economic Survey of 2014–15 listed them, included an ordinance to make land acquisition less onerous. A bill to exempt five categories of project, among them defence, rural infrastructure, affordable housing, industrial corridors and infrastructure, from the consent and impact rules passed the Lok Sabha on 10 March 2015. The bill went no further, and it did not become law.
Put the Indian outcome beside the Chinese one. In India the farmer’s refusal was loud enough to move a factory across the country, and then to rewrite a national law. Industry leaders predicted in 2011 that the consent rule would make assembly slow and uncertain. In the Landesa survey, 22.5 percent of takings involved no payment received, and 17.8 percent involved forceful eviction.
Sanand
The plant at Sanand was opened on 2 June 2010 by Narendra Modi, then Gujarat’s chief minister, with Ratan Tata present. It covers 725 acres, with an adjoining vendor park of 375 acres, and an initial capacity of 250,000 cars a year. Business Today reported that the state had also offered a guarantee of local manpower if Tata joined in training.
Sanand is the case for the other side of the argument: in Business Today’s account, a ready site and a state that moved quickly. The sources for this chapter do not say on what terms the Sanand land was assembled, so the chapter does not claim it was fairer.
After a change of state government in May 2026, West Bengal’s new government was reported to be exploring talks to bring the Tatas back to Singur; nothing had been signed.
Twenty years after the acquisition, the same site was still part of the state’s industrial politics. The Indian answer to the land question has also kept moving, towards pooling rather than taking: Andhra Pradesh pooled about 33,733 acres by October 2015 for its new capital, and the Collector’s folder in chapter 16 carries how that bargain and Punjab’s withdrawn one have fared since.
Neither flatters its owner
One system was slow because it listened. The other was fast partly because it did not. In India a farmer’s refusal could be loud enough to send a factory across the country, and the Supreme Court agreed with the farmers a decade later, too late for the car and for the soil. In China, farmers were paid a mean 18,739 yuan a mu where the authorities received 778,000. The difference stayed with the authorities that sold the land. The margin was a revenue line, and revenue lines can fall: local governments’ land-sale income dropped by double digits for a third straight year in 2024, as the property downturn dragged on.
Door D4 · openedLand was one thing a Chinese local government could turn into money. Borrowing was another. On a Sunday evening five weeks after Ratan Tata left Singur, Beijing asked for investment to be expanded quickly and forcefully, and much of the money for it would be raised by local companies whose debts no budget showed.