Bengal Means Business

With the Bengal Global Summit bringing investment proposals worth over Rs 2 lakh crore, Mamata Banerjee’s efforts to shed her anti-industry image seem to be paying off at last.

- Romita Datta

In the not-so-distant past, West Bengal had acquired the reputation of being a sort of graveyard for industry. After all, Bengal was where the venerable Ambassador wheezed its last, in 2014. True, the closure of Hindustan Motors’ Uttarpara plant had less to do with the state it was in than the more-than-aged veteran that was the Ambassador. But, then again, Bengal is also the state that refused the Tata Group its Nano factory in Singur in 2008. Mamata Banerjee, the architect of the Singur protests, has been chief minister of the state for about seven years now. ‘Pro-people’ is a fairly accurate description of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief and her politics, but for many, that is synonymous with ‘anti-industry’.

Other problems bedevil the state too. For instance, between June and September last year, the agitation for a Gorkhaland state by the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM) paralysed the Darjeeling hills, with business and tourism losses pegged at hundreds of crores. During the 104-day shutdown, 12 people were killed, government buildings were vandalised or set on fire, and the army called in to restore peace. There are other stories about industry suffering in the state. Infosys, which had invested Rs 75 crore during the Left Front’s rule to acquire a 50-acre plot on the outskirts of Kolkata to build a development centre, found itself in a spot in 2011 when the Mamata government refused to approve the project as an SEZ (Special Economic Zone).