Buddha has been refusing meetings since last year, sanction for
400 acres
NANDINI GUHA
Posted online: Saturday, March 05, 2005 at 0211 hours IST
KOLKATA, MARCH 4: With help from Bengal nowhere in sight, Alfred
Ford
has decided to shift his Vedic village to Madhya Pradesh. What
Mayapur
will be left with is a downscaled version of the proposed Rs 600-cr
project.
Ford
had been camping in Kolkata over the past few days but Writers'
Buildings repeatedly turned down requests for a meeting. With
Chief
Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya refusing to meet him yet again
this
week, Ford decided to do without government ''involvement'' and
go
ahead with a Vedic village on a very small scale at Mayapur. ''The
Chief Minister is just not interested. All we had asked the government
to do is sanction 400 acres. That has not happened in two years.
We
will start with, maybe, 25 acres on our own,'' Ford's representative
in India, Sudipto Mukherjee, told The Indian Express.
Ford, who is in Mayapur at the moment, will stop over in Kolkata
on
Saturday to catch a flight to the US. Mukherjee said Ford had
held
successful meetings with Himachal Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh
and
would build a ski village there.
And,
what Bengal lost in terms of investment, will go to Madhya
Pradesh. Former CM Uma Bharati had bagged a Rs 300-crore tourism
project from Ford, the second largest in the country after Mayapur.
Bhattacharya,
on the other hand, had refused Ford audience even last
year when he was here to commit investment worth Rs 600 crore.
''In
fact, the Madhya Pradesh government is offering us free land for
this
project,'' Bhakticharan Swami, a member of ISKCON in charge of
the
project, said. The MP government and ISKCON have already identified
a
plot in Ujjain, on the banks of the Narmada.
Industries
Minister Nirupam Sen said he was ''not aware'' of Ford
being turned away. ''I don't think they had approached our department;
we have always welcomed investment with open arms,'' Sen added.
http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=65872
