early October 2005 after Bangladesh asked for additional trade concessions, and Burma and India chose to develop a direct route between them. In 2006, Rahman accused Burma and India of having encroached on thousands of square miles of Bangladeshi territorial waters for natural gas exploration. Rahman was involved in talks between the government and India's Tata Group in early 2006 over a $300 million proposal to build steel and fertiliser factories, as well as a power plant. After the talks were unsuccessful, Rahman opened talks with Pakistan's Dawood Group in August 2006 on a more modest $30 million deal. In September 2005, Rahman announced a 16 percent increase in petrol prices to aid the government-owned Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation, due to the price increases for crude oil on world markets. The price hikes sparked protests in Dhaka, and the government adopted a five-day workweek to conserve energy. It expected that the private sector would follow the government example. In June 2006, Rahman announced an additional one-third increase in petrol prices, as well as a 10 percent increase in diesel and kerosene prices, one of the largest fuel-price hikes in Bangladesh's history. In late August 2006, protesters demanded Rahman's resignation as energy adviser and burned him in effigy in response to plans by the British corporation Asia Energy (now Global Coal, GCM Resources) to develop an open-pit coal mine in Phulbari, Dinajpur district. Activists said that the mine would cause environmental damage, threaten water supply, and displace up to 120,000 residents of the area, including the Shantal indigenous peoples. On the first day of protests, police killed six persons and 300 were injured in a massive protest of 30,000 people outside the local Asia Energy offices. The protests spread and the next day, twenty people were injured. Students at Dhaka University joined the effort. An estimated 70,000 people in total joined the protests across the country. As of December 2010, the mine was still being protested and the government had not awarded a contract for its development. In 2006 Rahman urged calm, saying, "This incident has sent the wrong message to foreign investors, which we cannot afford at all when we are struggling hard to woo more and more investment." Caretaker government Khaleda Zia's government ended in October 2006 and, under the constitution, elections are supposed to take place within three months, or January 2007. That fall there was a fierce struggle