Aiming to unseat the Left Front after three decades, the Trinamool Congress has made a long list of promises on industry, agriculture, health, education and tourism. Among many other things, if Mamata Banerjee is voted to power, she has set herself a target of 1,000 days to initiate and complete the process of inviting both the public and private sector and offer contracts to modernise and improve facilities at the Kolkata airport and other identified airports in the state. She also wants to develop West Bengal as a logistics hub and a transport corridor, which means Haldia port is likely to get a leg-up. But anyone who has flown in and out of Kolkata will know just how challenging the modernisation of the airport will be. On any day, be prepared to encounter the following at the airport?long and winding queues at every counter, trolleys that don?t work, whimsical taxi drivers, touts, cows and gambling dens on the approach road. The gateway to Kolkata, the Kolkata airport, is its worst advertisement. Apparently, 10 million passengers used the airport in 2010 and each one must have had a personal horror story to narrate. The airport modernisation has been in the works for years and every effort at the airport, from staff to mangled trolleys, appears to be geared towards harassing the passenger. In a way, the airport mirrors what is happening in many sectors of Bengal today. For instance, if one were to look at some of the parameters that are used to count a citizen?s comfort factor?roads to transport to health?Bengal is a laggard. When, on April 18, West Bengal goes to the first phase of a six-phase assembly poll, the picture won?t be rosier. For one, the state is sitting on a huge debt burden of R1.86 lakh crore in 2010-11. In 2010, the Left Front government took some wee steps to usher in a reign of fiscal discipline, but adopted the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act only late last year. It did manage to improve revenue collection, and while presenting the vote-on-account last week, state finance minister Asim Dasgupta said it is estimated that the fiscal deficit, revenue deficit and debt to GDP will decline from 6.2%, 5.4% and 41.9% last year to 3.9%, 3.1% and 40.4% in the current year. But does this indicate a recovery in fiscal parameters? The jury is out on that one, because through the years, the Left Front government has had a very low capital expenditure and has hardly created any revenue generating assets.
Experts point out that other states borrow too, but they do so to build roads or other assets, in short, on development, but that the Bengal government has been borrowing largely to pay salaries, pension and interest.
If you spoke with any industrialist last year and asked about expansion, chances were most would say they were expanding outside Bengal. For the past one year, Mamata Banerjee has been assiduously distancing her party from the bandh culture Bengal is so steeped in. She said, at more platforms than one, that she was against anything that held up the economy, never mind that in her journey to the top
Opposition leader in the state, she has held Bengal to ransom more than once with her stoppages. What will make it even tougher is Mamata?s cadres, many of them with the Left till some years ago, and brought up on a shoddy work ethic. Whoever comes to power in Bengal, has a lot of work to do on key sectors like engineering, power, mining, textiles, agriculture, food processing and IT. Experts say that, to get the economy going, Mamata will rely on her Railways ministry to give the initial big push. Mamata has talked about 16 factories, surrounding engineering, wagon-building and so forth, even 4-5 could change the face of industry in the state, for long out of touch with big industry and the changes in that sector. For the Railways, land acquisition, a sore point in fertile Bengal, which has only 1% of fallow land, won?t be a problem, and that gives the Trinamool Congress a real edge.
Bengal is the largest rice and vegetables producer and second largest potato producer?and can?t grow much beyond this as there are issues around falling productivity, poor irrigation and quality of soil. There?s a lot the Left Front could have done on food processing, but its efforts failed to make much headway. Even now, you will hear of a bumper potato crop going waste and the farmer having to opt for distress sales. Bengal hasn?t adopted the APMC Act, something the Trinamool Congress makes a poll promise. Luckily for the people, despite the Singur and Nandigram setbacks, both the key parties now are harping on industry as being the only way out to lift the economy.
