It is as unmistakable as it un-missable. Irrespective of whether you are travelling by air or by road, it is impossible to notice that the green color in the fields of West Bengal is very unlike that in anywhere else in the country. The vast lushness is a pointer to the fertility of the land. The Gangetic plains of West Bengal have been made fertile over the ages from the silt from the Ganges. And it is right in the middle of this riot of fertility sits the Tata Motor’s plant that will make the $2,500 car – the Nano.

The Tata’s stole the name (from Apple) and if the farmers of the region are to be believed, they also stole the peasant’s land. Tatas argue that they paid fairly to the land owners. Without challenging the veracity of that claim, the question emerges around what is fair compensation. In a world today where food-grain production is shrinking and prices are defying gravity and the grasp of the common man, the fair price of a piece of land that gave four crops a year is not the transactional value. The fair price is the present value of the cash streams the crops would generate over the ages – that is the true replacement value, if the concept of replacement ever exists in the agriculture-industry divide. The Tatas definitely did not pay that.

The role of the state – a Communist state at that – is equally questionable in allowing the transaction (actually facilitating the transaction). Again the question is not that of fair compensation. The question is the larger one of sacrificing prime agricultural land in favor of consumer industry. Nowhere in the world is this practiced. The Bangalore International Airport is built on land, the vast majority of which is infertile – and that is the trade-off the state is expected to make. In fact, the Ramakrishna Hedge government refused the same Tata’s to build their car factory when the industrial house had identified arable land that the state refused to part with (the Maharashtra government allocated waste-land in Pune where the factory stands today). West Bengal’s impatience in reversing the industry-averse face of its economic policies is understandable but equally confounding is its abject abandon showed towards the farmers of Singur.

The benefits of having a huge automotive factory and all the ancillary units it spawns is undeniable. As is welcome the employment generation such ecosystems brings about. However, like all economic analysis, the answer lies at the margin – the margin of costs and benefits. It may not align with the Tata’s way of reasoning, but in the case of Singur, the answer skews against the benefits.

No matter how derided the democratic system is, it remains the only one that provides the common man with an unseen weapon. And the farmers did brandish that when in the recent local body elections, the Communist parties were voted out of power in areas that were their bastions for the past three decades. It has been argued that the peasants are naïve – they can learn new trades and find employment at the same factory that they are opposing. That sounds terribly like what Marie Antoinette said to the French uprising of 1889. When reminded that the protestors have no bread to eat, she had wondered – “why don’t they have cake”?