West Bengal finance, industry and IT minister Amit Mitra on Friday said that the Tata Group in the state has witnessed a huge growth in workforce. The group plans to increase its workforce from the present 45,000 to 65,000.
To a question related to the exit of Tata Motors from Singur, posed by Express Group wholetime director and head-new media Anant Goenka, Mitra said that in West Bengal a Tata Group company, Tata Metaliks, was in expansion mode and TCS was hiring 20,000 people, which would take the Tata Group’s workforce in West Bengal to 65,000 from present 45,000.
“The Tatas are present here with Tata Metaliks, Tata Hitachi and TCS. No other company in the state has such large presence in terms of manpower,” said Mitra, adding that Singur was a case of people’s interest since “land cannot be allowed to be acquired forcibly”.
Speaking at the Express Technology Sabha, Mitra said HSBC had brought its global back office to West Bengal since the attrition rate was lowest — only 3% — in the state compared to 30%-40% in cities like Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chandigarh.
Highlighting the state government’s IT initiatives, Mitra said the government had completely stopped paper spending and every rupee spent was captured in e-kuber, the IT platform of the Reserve Bank of India, which brought the state government treasury under its monitoring.
To ensure transparency in procurement, Mitra said 64 departments of the state government could not make any purchases without e-tendering and the system had also been rolled out in municipalities with plans to introduce it at the panchayat level soon.
He said the state, under the e-kuber system, was connecting every panchayat with e-fibre. “A state data centre is worth looking at,” said Mitra. But even with e-processes transparency issues needed checking with constant feedback, Mitra added.
He said the state was putting up an analytics park on 50 acres in Kalyani, around 60 km from Kolkata, which would soon be transferred to a health hub with the AIIMS coming up there, to an education hub with a university already existing and IT hub with a new analytics park. He asked PSUs to make use of advanced analytics for business projections.
Taking a dig at the Centre, Mitra said while the state had spent R1,000 crore for its flagship Kanyashree project, the Centre had made budgetary allocations of R100 crore only for its ‘Beti Bachao – Beti Padhao’ programme.
On GST, Mitra said the state was opposed to loss of any revenue and the Centre should compensate for the losses.
He said the GST rates required to be low in order to check evasion. Mitra said there was a massive technology platform required in order to administer GST, which was basically a destination tax.