Didi Means Business

It took more than a decade and three back-to-back assembly wins for the Mamata Banerjee government to roll out the red carpet again for the Tatas. Mamata came to power on the back of a farmers’ movement in Nandigram-Singur against the land acquisition for the Tata Nano factory (2006-08), and it hasn’t been easy for her government to shed the anti-industry image it acquired in the bargain.

- Romita Datta

Even after all the talk of Rs 12 lakh crore worth of investment proposals from the five editions of the Bengal Global Business Summit (2015-19), actual investments “were Rs 50,00060,000 crore in the past decade”, says a senior government official on condition of anonymity. “Of this, the Centre’s contribution was around Rs 10,00012,000 crore. As for jobs, around 100,000 were created in big industries and another 300,000 in MSMEs,” adds the official. Ex-industry minister and current finance minister Amit Mitra, however, insists that 40 per cent of said investment proposals are in various stages of implementation.

With a third and decisive election victory under her belt, Mamata Banerjee believes it is time her government made a determined effort to bring industry to the state. A telling declaration of this intent was new industry minister Partha Chatterjee’s statement that the Tatas are among the “most respected business houses in the country and are most welcome to come and invest in Bengal”. A new Tata Centre is coming up at Rajarhat, Kolkata’s IT hub, and the government is tying up with the Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai, to upgrade the SSKM Hospital and Medical College.

Mamata knows the 2021 mandate was largely due to her government’s social welfare schemes, but “she also realises that industry needs a big push to create jobs for the youth and stop the drain of human capital from the state”, says the industry minister. To this end, she is expanding the scope of IT and ITES, which, as per government claims, have seen a five-fold increase from 500 to 2,600 units and a doubling of exports (Rs 29,000 crore in 2018-19) and employment generation (from 90,000 to 210,000 jobs) in the past 10 years.