The land is barren. The machines are silent. There is no clamour of the workingmen. No noise of children in schools either. Bindeshwar Singh stood in the graveyard silence watching the empty factory land, and then looks up. What does this diesel engine generator operator of Keshoram Refractory Factory in Kulti see? ‘I wonder if Didi’s helicopter can land on this stretch of earth.’ Today is May Day. But Bindeshwar Singh doesn’t have any work at hand to demand eight hour work-hours.
But what is the relation between “didimoni”, the CM of West Bengal, and this deserted factory land? Standing on the three hundred and fifty acres of land of the Keshoram Refractory Factory of ward number 21 of Kulti Township Bindeshwar Singh, Babudhan Singh, Prabhash Bhattacharya and others reminded us of that fateful day. They said, the day before the president came to meet the chief minister at Nabanna, their MLA Sohrab Ali had also come to this piece of land. With him was businessman Narendra Kumar Singh. He would buy the factory for several crore rupees. The factory was not in this run down state, they said. Just 5 months after the state government changed hands the factory gates were locked. The owner withheld the wages of more than 250 workers. The local MP Banshagopal Chowdhury has written to the State Labour department many a time. But the deputy commissioner of the department sat on the pertaining files and finished off the factory. Later, on that day, the factory was sold off. The TMC MLA faced a ‘gherao’ for 4 hours at a stretch by the people.
After the factory closed down the water and electricity supply to the 2 thousand plus people in the Kulti area was cut off. Just adjacent to the factory was a primary school, where more than 250 young children studied. The school even had four teachers. Classes were suspended and the teachers were fired from jobs. Now the local TMC MLA is the owner of the factory. It is heard that he is secretly planning to sell the land. So the workers keep a vigilant watch on the land.
The Kulti Factory was closed down on the 31st March of 2003. The musician who is racing all over the constituency to scour out all the votes he can has stood in the elections on behalf of the party which was in the central government at that time. And a member of the NDA alliance government’s cabinet, which had signed on the decision to close down the factory, is now the Chief Minister of West Bengal. The BJP and TMC alliance had passed the execution order on the Kulti factory. Their one decision left bereft the hands of 3240 capable workers. It was not only a question of the livelihood of those workers, the markets of the entire region encompassing Asansol, Borakor and Ranigunj, are in crisis. A deathlike emptiness descended on these markets.
The workers of Kulti have seen how the factory gates are locked; they’ve also seen all complications being unravelled and the locks being opened. On the 25th of September 2007, when the gates reopened, the UPA-1 government was at the centre. Basudeb Acharya and Bangsagopal Chowdhury, the representatives of the simple hard working people of this area, had convinced Central Minister Ram Vilas Paswan to restart work at the factory. It reopened as the “Foundry Unit” of the “Growth Division” of SAIL. Paswan promised that Kulti’s would be restored to its old glory. But the 2nd UPA government formed by the TMC and Congress have forgotten the promises they had given to the factory workers. However, the people, especially workers, of Kulti had not forgotten anything.
They have not forgotten the year 2010 when the erstwhile Central Rail Minister Mamata Banerjee had laid a foundation stone there from Andal by remote control switch. A fantastic tale of a rail wagon factory on the joint prerogative of SAIL and Indian Railways at the Kulti factory land was engraved on the stone. It still adorns the gates of the deserted factory yard. But to this date, not a single bogie has pulled out of the proposed factory. A great treachery with the people of Kulti.
The ruling party’s enthusiasm when it comes to closing down factories far surpasses their show of a pro-industry stance. This became apparent in the experience at Singur of driving away the Tata factory. It became further reinforced by the poor state of affairs in the industrial scenario in West Bengal. The people at Kulti have learned it the hard way by experiencing the indifference of the state government to building another factory in the town. The land belonged to ISCO. SAIL wanted to invest in it. Not a small strip either, a full 942 acres. And all the government had to do was change the name of the owners of the land. Both the enterprises are state owned, under the same ministry. The Chairman of SAIL C S Verma met the Chief Minister twice to make this change of name possible. The finance minister Amit Mitra, and minister of industry Partha Chatterjee were present at the meetings. All in vain, a government so dedicated to building industry which couldn’t accomplish the tiny bit of paperwork of changing the name of the state enterprise that owns a land, all that was needed to start off a large public sector factory.
In the scorching sun, the grounds of the coalfields are cracking and the mouths of the mines are caving in one by one, robbing more and more workers of their wages. In the middle of this crisis, Kulti is in an outcry over water. People in the parched areas of Saantkoria, Dishergarh, Barakar, Kulti, Rahimpura, Patiyana read articles written by big city-based doctors in the newspapers telling them to bathe twice a day and they laugh to themselves. They’re lucky if they can manage to wash themselves once in two days. In eight to ten wards of Kulti, people survive on water from ISCO. In large parts of the town, people can be found standing in queue for water even at 12 in the night. Yet, the Left Front Government had brought a drinking water project under the National Urban Renewal Scheme to Kulti. Not just the project, but 132 crore rupees. The TMC government has sent back all that money in the last 3 years. Work on the drinking water plant at Asansol has also come to a standstill. The land is dry and the thirst is getting harder to tolerate. The people are counting the days till they can throw the betrayal on the promise of wages and water into the face of the rulers. The people of Kulti are saying that a bard’s songs won’t quench their thirst.
May 4, 2014