Nobel laureate Amartya Sen in The Telegraph, Calcutta, on the Singur controversy:

“That politics might change over time once the terrible consequences of industrial and economic stagnation are more widely appreciated and understood. But for the moment the political attraction of street activism seems dominant, supplemented intellectually by the old physiocratic illusion of prosperity grounded only on agriculture. The latter piece of romantic thought cannot but fade over time with the influence of realism (no country has ever achieved much prosperity on the basis of agriculture alone). But at this moment realism looks like a distant dream.”

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