The eyes of Bakul Das Adhikary told the agony of Nandigram a day after the March 14 firing last year. The picture on left, published in The Telegraph on March 16, 2007, shows Bakul, 52, looking out of her house in Nandigram, waiting for news of her daughter Mahamaya, 30, who was injured in the police firing. On Thursday, The Telegraph found the daughter and mother (right) in front of their home in Adhikaripara in Nandigram's Gokulnagar. Mahamaya was hit in both legs by rubber bullets fired by the police. She fell down and was taken to a primary health centre, where she spent the night. The next day, Mahamaya was sent off to her uncle's house in Sonachura and treated for injuries for a month. Bakul's husband, Prabhat, 58, is a peon at Gokulnagar High School. Their son Tuhin, 26, is a local primary school teacher. The family owns about five bighas of farmland in Gokulnagar. Calcutta, March 13: Business did not turn its back on Bengal but industrialisation has lost its hubris. That is the big picture emerging a year after police opened fire in Nandigram, leading to the death of 14 people and setting in motion a chain of events whose ripples are yet to die down. The March 14 firing polarised Bengal, turned land acquisition into a dirty word, ignited a nationwide debate on industrialisation and pushed the CPM into a "recapture' that became one of the biggest public relations disasters in the party's history. The cycle of atrocities also spawned doomsday theories of Bengal becoming an industrial pariah. But statistics show investors did troop to Bengal, though the picture is not all that rosy on execution. Proposals in steel and aluminium poured into Bengal since March 14, 2007, with the state signing as many as 13 agreements that promise a cumulative investment of over Rs 1 lakh crore. The only company to back out post-Nandigram came back with a bigger plan. The Kalyani Group now wants to set up a 1-million-tonne speciality steel plant, besides the forging plant it had mooted earlier. But the operative word here is "proposals'. The money will be put on the table only if around 22,000 acres can be acquired, for which politicians as well as bureaucrats seem to have lost nerve after Nandigram and in the run-up to the panchayat polls. Most of the steel plants are slated to come up in Purulia and Bankura. Both have non-fertile land which is less controversial but acquisition is difficult without administrative thrust. Apart from the deserted Nayachar Island and the government land at Salboni, the state administration could not make much headway in finding space for industry over the past year. Already blamed for dragging its feet, the bureaucracy turned more cautious, taking its cue from a guarded political establishment. After the Nandigram mess, the state government decided not to invoke the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, which was used in Singur. Instead, it decided to give the direct-purchase model a try, without much success till now. "It is to be seen how many proposals materialise as large tracts of land will have to be acquired,'' an industry department official said. The expansion of National Highway 34 has been put on hold over fears of backlash linked to land. But investors acknowledge that some delay could not be helped. "It is important to build consensus among all people. It may take some time. But it is better in the long term,' said Aditya Jajodia of Jai Balaji Group, which wants to set up a steel plant. State industries secretary Sabyasachi Sen tried to allay the fears but the keyword