From 600 acres to 50,now HIDCO says not more than 35 acres for NSG hub

“HIDCO was asked to earmark the land for NSG,but they have said they would be able to hand over only 35 acres of land,’’ said Ananda Gopal Ghosh,Special Secretary,Home Department.

An official of NSG today visited the office of HIDCO and held preliminary talks. Tomorrow a team of the agency will do a recce of the site and send its report to Delhi. After the 26/11 terror attack in Mumbai the central government decided to set up NSG hubs in four cities—-Mumbai,Kolkata,Hyderabad and Chennai. And immediately after that the search for land to set up a training centre on the lines of the one at its Manesar centre in Haryana started with the teams of the agency visiting sites at Panagarh at Burdwan,Barrackpore and Kaikhali in North 24-Parganas and Dunkuni in Hooghly. In all the places they were shown plots of 600 acres as per their demand.

But things could not be finalised as the NSG and the state government could not agree on the price of land and at Kaikhali there were some emcroachments which could not be removed.

Finally,NSG said it was ready to build the hub on 300 acres and accordingly the state government earmarked some land at Jagdishpur at Rajarhat but that also got stuck as local people formed anti-land eviction group and stalled the move. After Mamata Banerjee came to power,NSG further scaled down its demand to 50 acres. The NSG already has a small contigent stationed at Badu in North 24-Parganas district.