West Bengal: Back to the future

Building an investment culture will be challenging

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As symbolism goes, the meeting between West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and Tata group Chairman N Chandrasekaran could not have been more significant. Seventeen years ago, Ms Banerjee made the Tata group's signature Nano plant in Singur the focus of her campaign to oust the Left Front from its more than three-decade rule in the state. Her high-decibel crusade, centred on defending the rights of those who had been unwilling to sell land for the project, worked. The group exited Singur in 2008 and relocated to Sanand, Gujarat, when Narendra Modi was chief minister there, with then group chairman Ratan Tata making elliptical allusions to "Good M and Bad M". Behind the optics of the new-found bonhomie with his successor is a hard reality. State elections loom in less than a year. With the Bharatiya Janata Party having made inroads into Trinamool strongholds, the lack of meaningful investment in the state is becoming glaringly evident even as nearby Odisha, Telangana, and Andhra Pradesh surge.