Crippled by the Nano row, families in resort to desperate measures----- Going into class VIII, Srabanti Patra, as always, figured W, jH among the top ten students ^I^P in class. When the year started, she approached her father, Prabir, for the admission fee of Rs 270. Prabir, 40, went speechless for a while. He broke his silence to say: "I am sorry dear. I have no money to fund your education. I have lost all my land to Tata". The farmer had to give away his one-acre cultivable land to Tata Motor's Nano project, refusing to take the government compensation in protest. "I bowed in pain while listening to my father's emotionally charged words. They hit me so hard that I could not eat for days," said Srabanti. The Bengal government had acquired 967 acres for the Nano project. About 400 acres of that had become the cause of disagreement, as nearly 2,200 farmers, who earlier owned it, refused compensation and demanded their cultivable land back. The government did not budge, not wanting to hamper thep roject. A series of negotiations, which was missing before the acquisition, brought the government and the opponents of the project, led by Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee, face to face. But nothing worked out. Finally, on October 3, Ratan Tata declared the pullout of his dream project from West Bengal. Within days, Tata drove down to Gujarat, his "most-favoured industrial destination in India", and declared in a joint press conference with Chief Minister Narendra Modi in Gandhinagar that "Nano willbe rolled out fromSanand". That has almost sealed Srabanti's fate. A Trinamool man, Prabir, like other supporters of the Save Farmland Committee, would not take compensation, and Srabanti would not have money to pay her fee. Mamata made a rare post-pullout visit to Singur when the state government invited First Automobiles Works to the land the Tatas had deserted. Soon after executives of the Chinese car manufacturer visited the site, Mamata, opposing the move, demanded floating of a global tender for a reassignment. But the "excess" land should be returned, she said, setting a deadline of December 2. Mamata said she along with other party leaders would begin token cultivation of vegetables on the land if the government did not oblige. Caught in the political turmoil are families like Prabir's. "It was a big dilemma for me. I could have taken the compensation and let my daughter go to school. But that could have isolated me in the village. I did not want to go against the political might which gained lot of supports," he said. Before the government had acquired his land in 2006, Prabir had a cash reserve of Rs 50,000, which he spent for his son Sumon, doing his masters in geography in Nagpur. "I have called my son back and asked him to work here to contribute to the family," said Prabir. "What else could have I done? Can anybody run the family with an income of Rs 15 a day? Education is a luxury in my family now." Prabir is not alone, nor is Srabanti or Sumon. Every man, woman and child in Singur has despair written on their face. Mritunjoy Patra, 53, whose two-bigha (one bigha is one-third an acre) plot was acquired by the state government, also asked his 16-year-old daughter to discontinue studies. Santana, a class IX student at Beraberi High School cried when her helpless father could not give her the fee for the class X admission. "There is no way I could take the money from the government. It's better you discontinue school. We are ready to die for the land," Mritunjoy told Santana. Mritunjoy joined the land movement started in December 2006, and was arrested twice. He spent a month in judicial custody. With a literacy rate of over 75 per cent, schools in Singur never went dry. "Even during a natural calamity, we never saw students drop out," said Dudhkumar Dhara, chief of the Trinamool Congress-controlled Beraberi gram panchayat. "But thanks to the Nano fiasco, we have hundreds of students not going to school." Three gram panchayats in Singur