The more things change in Bengal, the more they remain the same.
In January 2016, the most ‘poriborton’-friendly gentry of West Bengal huddled together under their eccentric but benevolent chief minister, Mamata Banerjee. They held the second Bengal Global Business Summit, with political bigwigs imported from Delhi—finance minister Arun Jaitley, railways minister Suresh Prabhu, power minister Piyush Goyal and roads minister Nitin Gadkari—joining an A-list of corporate honchos to tempt the elusive unicorn of private investment into the state.
After two days came the state government’s expected grand declaration: “Business announcements and document exchanges, expression of interest and investment proposals” worth Rs 2.5 lakh crore had been signed. It will be a while before anybody knows how many propos als fructify but the show was, at least, welltimed to grab maximum attention. Undoubtedly, the backdrop against which Bengal’s elections are being fought is ‘devel opment’. When a Tata firm shut shop in Calcutta last week, letting go or relocating to Jamshedpur some 300 employees, commentators made dire predictions for Bengal’s economic prospects. Without a clear uptick in the economy, Mamata’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) would find it harder to seek the voter’s mandate to carry on for another five years in a jobs, cash, ind ustry and investmentstarved state.
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