The West Bengal government has sent feelers to the Tata group to state the compensation it needs for the aborted Singur project. The state finance department will have to provide for it in the budget due in July.

However, the industry department will begin formal discussions with the group only after the Bill to amend the land acquisition statute for Singur is cleared by the state assembly. On its part, the group said it had received no communication from the state government till Saturday.

The Mamata Banerjee-led government, caught on the wrong foot over issuing an ordinance on Singur despite the assembly being in session, has instead decided to table a land acquisition amendment Bill on Tuesday.

But even after the Bill is passed, it will have to pass muster in the courts. The Bill will, at one stroke, acquire the controversial stretch of about 400 acres in Singur and then return it to the farmers from whom it was acquired.

Economist Abhirup Sarkar acknowledged there would be legal ramifications that ?cannot be settled in a day or two?. But he said a signal had been sent to the industry that land could not be acquired forcibly. Sarkar said the industry should buy land directly from the owners. ?Industry buys raw material and raises capital. Why not do the same with land,? he asked.

Speaking to FE, Feedback Ventures chairman Vinayak Chatterjee said the Singur fracas was a one-off incident. ?A government lost power and a party gained power on the topic. How can it be judged on a par with other cases,? he said.

Former secretary of the ministry of corporate affairs RC Bandhopadhyay too felt the Singur Bill was not a template for other land related action by the state government.

However, industry leaders in West Bengal were reluctant to comment on the developments. While some admitted in private that it was a ?dangerous precedent?, others said they were happy that some sort of closure had been reached and that the state would move on from Singur.

Indian Chamber of Commerce director general Rajiv Singh said: ?It is a political decision, and it didn?t come as a surprise. We are not worried that this will impact business because Singur is a rare case, a one-off incident, which is

unlikely to be repeated again,? he added.

Emami director Aditya Agarwal said he was happy that the issue had been resolved. ?Land is scarce, there is no point in keeping 997 acres idle for so long and it is getting clear that the Tatas are not going to build anything there.? When pointed out that the Tatas were not allowed to build anything at Singur, Agarwal said ?that is because 400 acres were forcibly taken?.

Singh said Singur had become a very important issue ? ?the Left Front government lost the elections on this issue and the present government won on this issue? ? and had to be resolved, but this could not become a practice. But he admitted that the land rows around the country and Singur had sent ?enough messages to the industry?. He said a national consensus was emerging that land-losers needed to be compensated better and that the ?industry has understood this?.