 "West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee with industrialists during Bengal Global Business Summit in Kolkata")
It was September 2008. The agitation at Singur, led by Trinamool Congress's firebrand leader Mamata Banerjee, against Tata Motors' Nano project was at its peak. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, then chief minister, and his industry minister, Nirupam Sen, were making a desperate attempt from Writers' Building to retain the project.
Their efforts failed to move Banerjee. She was adamant that part of the Nano land as well as that earmarked for ancillaries which, she said, would be used to play golf and set up beauty salons, should be returned to the farmers.
Days later, Tata Motors pulled out from Singur. An emotional Ratan Tata while announcing the decision had famously said, "If you hold a gun to my head, either you pull the trigger or take the gun away as I will not move my head. Banerjee has pulled the trigger."
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As it turns out, Bengal is still nursing the wounds.
The pullout paid her political dividends alright - Banerjee routed the Left Front and came to power in 2011. A series of unpalatable decisions for the business community followed; Banerjee appeared to be wearing the anti-industry badge with pride and confidence.
The most significant among the many anti-industry decisions was the Singur ordinance that vested 997 acres of the erstwhile Nano site to the state government. It's another story that the matter is still in the courts.
The damage can be measured in numbers. According to the 2014-15 annual report of the Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion in the Union ministry of commerce and industry, during 2012-2014, Bengal received 214 investment proposals amounting to Rs 15,454 crore, which gives an annual average of Rs 7,727 crore. This is way below Rs 18,836 in 2002-07 (10th Five-year Plan) and Rs 102,378 crore in 2007-12 (11th Plan).
So it came as a surprise last week when Banerjee showed up at Salboni in West Medinipur for the ceremony to lay the foundation stone for JSW Cement's Rs 800-crore cement plant. A bigger surprise came when she waited patiently for JSW Chairman & Managing Director Sajjan Jindal to turn up as his flight had got delayed.
Addressing the land losers of Salboni, she said, "Don't be impatient. Of the 571 families, 85 have already got jobs. They have promised, in phases, the rest will also be employed. This land is a gold mine; it's right next to the National Highway."
Salboni's land losers have waited for long anyway. The project, originally a 10-million-tonne steel plant and 1,600 Mw power unit with an investment of Rs 35,000 crore, was conceived in 2007. But for want of raw material (iron ore and coal) linkages, it was put in the slow lane; the investment is now being revived on a truncated scale.
More surprise was on the way. Banerjee said since Sajjan means bhadra, Bangla for cultured, "let them do their work, we must not interfere in their work, and don't ask them for contracts and jobs". Her message to the syndicates that have become a menace in Bengal was loud and clear.
Jindal was overwhelmed. At the Bengal Global Business Summit, a day later, he said: "I have never seen a chief minister say all this. This is, in the true sense, ease of doing business."
Banerjee carried the charm offensive right through the summit. Among those present were Mukesh Ambani, Jindal, Niranjan Hiranandani, Subhash Chandra, Rakesh Bharti Mittal and Jyotsna Suri.
She told the participants that her government will work for them. "I want you to be the employer and we will be the employees," she told investors, offering a tax-friendly regime, surplus power, cheap labour and land.
Investors feel it's time to cash in on this mood and make some changes. Critical among those would be: amending the Urban Land Ceiling Act, allowing special economic zones (which has been holding back Wipro from expanding and Infosys from coming to the state), and of course, the famous land policy.
Immediately after she became the chief minister, Banerjee announced that her government would not facilitate land acquisition for industry. It cost Bengal dearly.
During 2005-2008, the Left Front government in Bengal had bagged investment proposals of Rs 237,000 crore - much of which reappeared in the list of the proposals worth Rs 250,000 crore from this summit - that included 10 steel plants with investment in excess of Rs 1,00,000 crore. But Banerjee's land policy has sent the projects that require large tracts of land to the cold storage.
The latest list of investment proposals from the Summit also includes a sizeable gift from New Delhi: investments in road, shipping, telecom and railways add up to Rs 51,000 crore.
"We need to see the manifesto ahead of the elections, whether she goes easy on some of her policies, at least the Urban Land Ceiling and SEZ," says an investor. "The government should realise that investors have no compulsion to invest in Bengal. They have the rest of the country and even the world," he says.
