Massive demonstrations led by the state's opposition party, the Trinamool Congress, have shut down the Tata plant. After protesters threatened assembly line workers, the automaker suspended production of its history-making Nano, a mini rear-engine car reminiscent of the Volkswagen Beetle. Last week, two other Indian states -- Karnataka in the south and Uttarakhand in the north -- offered Tata 1,000 acres for its car factory. However, those close to the talks said the automaker still hoped the Singur plant could be reopened, having invested an estimated $350 million in the operation.
But the transformation of farmland into industrial parks and enterprise zones appears to be accelerating in India, where two-thirds of the country's 1.1 billion people live in farming villages, economists say. Cities are severely overcrowded, as unskilled, landless peasants move into teeming urban slums, unprepared for jobs in a modernizing economy. An estimated 60 million largely poor and low-caste Hindus, as well as marginalized Muslims and tribal groups -- dubbed "development refugees" by social commentators -- have been displaced in the name of progress. In the Tata case, a third of the affected landowners were absentee landlords living in cities; the rest were unskilled workers such as Gosh or subsistence farmers with less than an acre.
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