Summing Up:
Here. Thanks Rimidi.
About Singur:
We went to Singur on the 17th with Aseem, spent the day there, walked over a few kilometers and spoke to people in about five villages. We have photographs and audio, which we will send around as reports and transcripts as soon as possible, along with the transcripts of the lectures and open house at the seminar and brainstorming on the 16th.
Briefly, people in Dobadi (a village full of landless labourers just outside the factory walls) are all but starving. They are unlikely to survive without our urgent attention and relief. They have no money to buy milk for their babies and they are fast running out of resources and food. If we want to keep these people from migrating to the city as destitutes in a few months we have to reach them with some relief urgently.
The men and boys who have been employed as guards at the TATA factory have not been paid their salary for four months.
The people eight sacks of 15 kg harvested potatoes were stolen from the fields near Khaserberia by people from the factory on the 16th night, the day before yesterday.
An 80 yr old woman in Purbopara said: "This is the first time in my life I'm having to buy ration rice, we always ate food from our own fields. We were self sufficient"
Women across the villages are making festoons with ribbons (12 festoons for Rs 2 which are taken by vendors from the city) to try and make some money...they are also embroidering bed covers for money for measly returns.
Most women in Dobadi have to leave their children and infants behind all day to work in fields that are 6/7 km away...they leave home at 3 am everyday and walk for 3/4 hrs and back again at the end of the day, sometimes quite late in the evening. They are paid anything from Rs. 30/- to Rs. 50/- per day - this is likely to go down as summer arrives as the landowners where they work know that these women have no other option. Most of this money is spent on buying rice for the large families, there is little left over for anything else - even basic medicine for the sick. There is a general trend of men taking to alcohol.
The people who have been given alternative houses near Dobadi live in the middle of the field just next to a high factory wall - 8 to 10 people in each room, no trees, shade or any water. These are ghettos not villages/settlements. They were flooded waist high when it rained because the natural drainage system of the area through the river has been damaged irrevocably by the factory constructions.
Finally, the factory is a fortress. there are walls inside walls inside walls. It is surrounded by a proper moat and wire fences. The floodlights point outwards to the fields not inwards, even though the theft of crops seems to be happening the other way round. There are watchtowers (machas) at intervals where the watch is kept from at night, every entrance is guarded by the police or local lads employed as guards.
The people are very angry, very little of it seems to have to do with TMC propaganda. They said "amader jomi niye nicche, desh niye nicche, mati niye nicche...ei kota lok ke tulte hajarkhanek police pathacche"
The Opposition has of course capitalised on the situation somewhat, but that may be a minor detail right now, which we probably should nonetheless keep in mind.
Lastly, they need Relief (rice, dal, milk powder, medicines, clothes) in Dobadi to survive a few more months.
We will send across our collated formal report across in two weeks to all of you along with photos and audio clips (if we can manage the technology).
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