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KOLKATA, March 14: At least 11 people were killed in India's West Bengal state on Wednesday after police fired on opponents of a planned industrial park in the worst day of unrest yet over a key government economic reform.
All the dead were villagers, senior police officer Raj Kanojia said, and several died in hospital from injuries received when a crude bomb they had prepared exploded prematurely.
Twenty people had been arrested, he said.
Earlier police said farmers and political activists, many armed with sickles, attacked officers as they tried to enter an area earmarked for the hub, forcing police to open fire.
It was the worst violence so far over controversial government plans to acquire farm land for a low-tax industrial development area, or Special Economic Zone (SEZ) at Nandigram, 150 km south of Kolkata.
In Nandigram, thousands of farmers sang religious songs and many Muslims -- the majority religious community in the area -- read verses from the Koran to protest at the police shooting.
“We will fight till the last drop of our blood but not give up an inch of land to the government,” Abdus Samad, a local Muslim leader, told newsmen by phone from Nandigram.
Hundreds of villagers gathered in front of two hospitals trying to find relatives injured or missing.
Dozens of women dressed in black blocked roads in the area.
Another 40 people were injured, including several policemen.
Authorities in communist-ruled West Bengal in eastern India want to set up a chemical industry hub in Nandigram with the support of an Indonesian conglomerate, the Salim Group.
It is just one of several hundred SEZs that the federal government wants to set up across the country in a bid to lure foreign investment and close the gap with China's manufacturing sector.
Major industrial projects in the neighbouring state of Orissa have also been stalled by protesting farmers unwilling to give up their land. Among them figures a high-profile $12 billion plant by South Korean steelmaker POSCO Co. Ltd.
Last week at least 50 people were injured near the proposed POSCO site when villagers for and against the project clashed.
LIGHTNING ROD: But Nandigram has proved a lightning rod for protests with farmers unwilling to give up their land for cash.
Previous clashes over the proposed SEZ since January have left at least seven dead, including one policeman, and more than 100 wounded.
Opposition parties in West Bengal walked out of the state assembly in protest at Wednesday's killings.
Roads were also blocked in Kolkata, causing traffic chaos.
Protesters set fire to a state-owned bus after evacuating passengers, police said. Trinamul Congress, the main opposition party in West Bengal, called a strike on Friday to protest the killings.—Reuters
