By Kunal Bose
KOLKATA: There is no running away from the reality that weight of history continues to hang heavy on West Bengal. In the context of this benighted state, it will be appropriate to quote Karl Marx from the eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of living.” No one will question the fact that the during the long tenure of the Left Front followed by Trinamool Congress administration of 15 years, West Bengal never came to grips with creating the right environment for industrial investment, particularly in very large units.
At the cost of repetition, it is to be said if during the Left Front regime the Indian big houses and foreign capital remained suspect in the eyes of the powers that be and militant trade unionism proved to be investment deterrent, the investment and working environment got further sullied under the Trinamool rule marked by extortion and thuggery. One example: JSW secured around 4,300 acres at Salboni in West Medinipur in 2008 when the Left Front was in power to build a very big steel mill that never happened because of the group’s inability to secure iron ore linkage from Odisha.
As it would be, the group came under the weather – threats from the extremists, peasant protests and demand for money and materials supply contracts from the local thugs – both in the dying years of Left Front rule and Trinamool regime. But why should the nightmares of the past two regimes be haunting the present BJP state administration? Business houses are said to have elephantine memory. An important criterion for them to invest capital in a greenfield project or make any major investment in an operational unit in a state is the perceived assurance of respect and security of the management.
Unfortunately, West Bengal, which once upon a time was the preferred destination of Marwari capital and multinational corporations saw the exodus of several big houses from the Birlas to Singhanias to Thapars and from Britannia to Philips through the sixties to the eighties for well recorded reasons. What, however, remains intriguing is,with Jyoti Basu in the chief minister’s office for as many as over 23 years and enjoying friendship as well as commanding the respect of the country’s leading industrialists, he could not arrest the steady decline in the state’s industrial fortune.
The outside world has no way of knowing what restrained Basu from taking corrective action. Likely the Marxist party, which in all circumstances has the last word, didn’t give Basu the free hand to arrest the slide. Whatever might have been, West Bengal remains a large market for industrial and consumer products and also gives access to the north east and beyond. Expectedly, therefore, at investor conferences held in the past two regimes, businessmen from different parts of the country would dutifully be here and promise investments, which mostly would remain good in paper and not realised.
Has the scene changed since Suvendu Adhikari became the chief minister of the state in May 2026 enjoying the support of 209 BJP MLAs in a 294-member house? There is the adage that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Over the decades, there has been a surfeit of promises of big investments in major industries made by three predecessors – Jyoti Basu, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and Mamata Banerjee – of the present chief minister and the result is there for everyone to see.
Each government in the post Dr BC Roy regime is to be blamed for the fall in West Bengal’s share of the country’s industrial production from a high of around 30 per cent immediately after Independence to approximately 3.5 per cent now. Through the past decades, once iconic units one after another fell sick leading to their closure. Factors leading to their demise or irretrievable sickness included their falling into wrong hands, inept management, products becoming obsolete or highly cost ineffective and no investment in modernisation. The government turning a blind eye to militant trade unionism was also a major reason for souring the investment outlook.
Despite its having historical roots in West Bengal, Philips no longer has a manufacturing plant here. Metal Box withered a long time ago. Britannia, which built its enormous fortune here, shut its manufacturing unit in Calcutta. So also some large central and state undertakings leaving large parcels of unutilised land in their trail. A major deterrent to building very large industrial units in the state is the scarcity of big plots of land running into some hundred acres. Thankfully, the state administration is to initiate steps to reclaim the land remaining unused with closed units like MAMC in Durgapur and Hindustan Fertiliser at Haldia – both central PSUs.
Since the ruling party at the centre and in West Bengal is the same, getting such unutilised land released to accommodate new units should not be a major issue. Unarguably, it will be easy for the local government to recover the land belonging to sick and shut state owned units. A few thousand acres thereby getting released will be found good to accommodate some modern large industrial units. From Ambani to Adani to Anil Agarwal have all met Adhikari and promised significant investment in West Bengal, long starved of capital.
One compelling condition for investment to flow is land availability in continuous big parcels whose acquisition must not create litigations and social frictions. NITI Aayog vice chairman Ashok Kumar Lahiri, a distinguished economist, says the state administration should ideally consider acquiring land, now under cultivation, for hosting industries. The state, according to him, must have some big industries to tackle the job crisis. It should not give any comfort that West Bengal’s unemployment rate is below the national average.
Quality jobs remain scarce leading to migration of talents to other cities where plentiful opportunities obtain. This besides, more than 2 million manual workers, mostly from North Bengal districts go all over the country and also abroad in the absence of job availability in their own state. The state has a population of over 100 million and density of people per sq. km is also very high. The BJP administration appears earnest about getting new private capital from business houses elsewhere in the country to give a push to industrialisation.
In this pursuit, the government appears to be keen to start buying land directly from the owners to create a land bank while at the same time encourage potential investors to also engage in land acquisition. But the state should have an oversight that landowners get a fair deal as they part with their asset. The recently announced industrial policy may not be any different from policies of other states, some of which are blessed with really big landbanks. Investors have a wide choice of choosing investment destination. So being earnest will not be enough, West Bengal will have to match the states competing for investment at every step. (IPA Service)
