Monday’s news that the new BJP government in West Bengal wants to revive the Calcutta Stock Exchange sent me to the dark alleys of nostalgia — the alleys of Lyons Range, to be precise. I walked those lanes last year after a 20-year gap. The building is still there — 7, Lyons Range — a tired Victorian sentinel in fading white, its Corinthian pillars watching over a street that no longer shouts stock prices.
For those of us who were financial journalists based in Kolkata till the early 1990s, Lyons Range was not an address. It was a sound. The roar of the “Ring”, the open outcry hall where jobbers in white dhotis and starched shirts screamed bids, tossed contracts, and settled fortunes before lunch.
The ticker tape, the chalkboards, the bhav for Tata Steel changing by the minute. Outside, the “kerb” market ran its own parallel exchange on the pavement, where shares were traded under umbrellas when the official bell rang shut. This was India’s second-oldest bourse, founded in 1908, and for decades it was the country’s only window to capital.
I remember the brokers who lunched at Nizam’s and settled trades over a mutton roll. My friends remind me of the day (I had left Kolkata well before that) Harshad Mehta’s shadow fell on then Calcutta and the badla system creaked. I remember April 2001, when the CSE payment crisis froze Rs 120 crore and three brokers took their lives.
The exchange never really recovered. Sebi derecognised it in 2013. The screens went dark. The Ring became a museum piece. Lyons Range turned quiet.
So, the promise to “revive CSE” stirs something. Nostalgia is a powerful political tool in Bengal, and there is no shortage of pride in the city that gave India banking, insurance, and equity trading.
The logic runs: Mumbai has BSE and NSE, Gujarat has GIFT City. Why shouldn’t Kolkata have its own exchange again? A revived CSE, the argument goes, could fund Bengal’s MSMEs, list jute and tea firms, and bring back financial jobs that fled to BKC.
I understand the sentiment. But nostalgia is a poor business plan. The fact is that circumstances have changed, irretrievably. Trading is no longer about a building or a region. It is about colocation servers, algo licences, and liquidity that lives on the NSE, which did Rs 2.3 lakh crore average daily turnover in cash markets in FY26. CSE’s last recorded daily turnover before deregulation was under Rs 10 crore.
You cannot revive that with a ribbon-cutting. Brokers have migrated, terminals are gone, and companies prefer Mumbai’s depth and GIFT City’s tax breaks. Sebi’s interoperability norms mean a regional exchange cannot ring-fence liquidity. It would be born into a world of zero-brokerage apps and nationwide order-matching that makes geography irrelevant.
Reviving CSE would need capital, tech, members, and, most of all, listings. Where are the Bengal-headquartered firms waiting to launch an IPO? The state’s big companies — ITC, Coal India, Exide — already trade where the volumes are. MSMEs can list on NSE Emerge or BSE SME without Lyons Range.
As for jobs, today’s exchange employs coders in Bengaluru, not jobbers in Dalhousie.
The building deserves preservation. Turn it into a finance museum. Host fintech startups in the old halls. Tell the story of how India learnt to price risk here, long before Dalal Street’s screens. That would honour Lyons Range more than a symbolic revival that struggles for trades and dies a second death.
Governments should fix Bengal’s ease of doing business, not chase the ghost of a trading ring. The outcry is over. The kerb is empty. The bell won’t ring again. And perhaps that is alright. Some addresses are meant to be remembered, not resurrected.
The BJP’s wish is understandable. Lyons Range still pulls at anyone who heard it roar. But markets don’t run on memory. They run on liquidity. And that, for better or worse, left Kolkata long ago. This will most probably remain just a wish.