Reflections: Bengal's CII connect

It was just as well Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee wasn’t present at the lavish “Hi-Tea” in Kolkata to launch Tarun Das’ book, Crossing Frontiers, and hear him being asked for advice about West Bengal’s regeneration. She would angrily have denied the basis of the question. Didi boasts that the state’s “growth of 10.5 per cent is far higher than the national growth of 7.5 per cent”. She gloats that “the per capita income has doubled and we have recorded an infrastructure growth of 600 per cent and development growth of 300 per cent.”

Sounds dizzy! Kolk-ata’s continuing explosion of new sari and jewellery shops and the unending eruption of condominiums certainly suggest Bengal is awash in disposable cash. But where does it come from? There are few signs of wealth-generating activity. The state is deeply in debt. Its infrastructure desperately needs upgrading. Jobs are scarce. Youth is migrating. There is no indication of the Confederation of Indian Industry, which Das set up singlehanded, returning to the city of its birth.

Time was when Bengal was India’s industrial hub as well as granary. Kolkata commanded the commerce of the world. “Death in my hands, but Gold!” Rudyard Kipling sang. The city set the imperial compass and fathered a cultural renaissance. “The loss of Calcutta would be tantamount to the loss of India” Lord Linlithgow, the viceroy, warned as Japanese aircraft bombed Howrah Bridge and Kidderpore Docks during World War II.

Das traces decline to the turbulent years when Bengal enriched the English language with the word gherao. As Crossing Frontiers says in staccato phrases, “The result: inability to deal with situations. Flight of capital from West Bengal. Industries in West Bengal becoming sick and closed. West Bengal’s loss was the gain of other parts of the country.” But the great-great grandson of Romesh Chunder Dutt, one of the earliest Indians in the ICS and author of The Economic History of India, should not ignore the adverse role of external agencies. Das’ distinguished ancestor argued that Indian manufacturing was suppressed to promote British goods.

“Millions of Indian artisans lost their earnings; the population of India lost one great source of their wealth” Dutt concluded. All West Bengal parties see a parallel in the Centre’s freight equalisation policy robbing the state of its advantage in respect of coal to benefit other regions. My former colleague, Ranajit Roy, bluntly accused Delhi of discrimination in The Agony of West Bengal: A Study in Union-State Relations. The Centre rejected Philips’ application to manufacture glow switches in Calcutta (its registered base), he said, claiming they belonged to the small scale sector, while allowing Philips to do so in Maharashtra and even encouraging the company to increase production.

Despite the somewhat Panglossian “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds” tone of Crossing Frontiers, Das gently poured cold water on a questioner’s suggestion that last week’s unveiling of three ITC projects, involving a Rs 3,000-crore investment, heralds Bengal’s new industrial dawn. He doesn’t see other industries following, or the ITC chairman, Y.C. Deveshwar, making further investments. Saying he would go wherever he could expand, Mr Deveshwar substantiated Das’ pessimism.

But, again, it was a good job Didi didn’t hear Das say Bengal has no land for industry. There are “more than a lakh acres” for the asking she declared at the ITC inauguration.

“All we need is the demand. If you ask us for land for your projects, you will have it.” She didn’t mention the catch. The land isn’t contiguous. ITC wanted a 60-acre plot but got 40 acres in one place and 18 in another.

Das and Didi agree, however, that apart from the service sector, the future lies in food-related industries. He said so at the launch, echoing the chief minister’s “Bengal is an agriculture-driven state” at the ITC event. “Setting up food processing units is naturally the next step for us. Once these units come up, ancillary industries will also follow.” It isn’t generally appreciated that apart from long-standing ambitious projects with cinchona, mulberries, avocado and floriculture, Bengal produces 20 per cent of India’s rice and 33 per cent of its potatoes.

The obstacle, as Das admitted, is that “we Bongs” don’t like manual work. His remark recalled the stark picture Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, undivided Bengal’s last Premier, painted on the eve of Independence.

Thwarted in his dreams of an independent Bengal or a Pakistani Kolkata, Suhrawardy declared bitterly, “So, in the end, the tussle will rage round Kolkata and its environments built up largely by the resources of foreigners, inhabited largely by people from other provinces who have no roots in the soil and who have come here to earn their livelihood, designated in another context as exploitation.”

The key word was foreigners. Bengalis were nowhere in the picture. Scots jute managers, English executives, labourers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthani tycoons were not stakeholders. That might partially be remedied by reviving the employer-employee partnership in which CII takes such just pride and without which there can’t be any industrial revival.

CII’s labour relations and legal services which were discontinued because they were seen as “West Bengal specific” should be restored for precisely that reason.

India needs a vibrant Bengal even if its ruling parties don’t toe the Centre’s political line and its chief ministers have an inexhaustible capacity for being cussed.

The alternative to CII intervention could be bleak. After attending CII’s 100th birthday bash in Calcutta in 1995, which Das’ book describes, Chan Heng Wing, aide to Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, the star of the show, told me Calcutta had shown him Singapore’s beginning. Kolkata could also preview the end.