State finances in bad shape, Mamata to Plan panel, Mentions several ideas to the Commission to woo investments in manufacturing, tourism and infrastructure.
Business Standard , July 26th 2011West Bengal’s new chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, has painted a gloomy picture of the economy bequeathed to her by her Left Front predecessors.
She said this to the Planning Commission last month, at a meeting to fix the annual Plan size for the state. The Commission fixed Plan size at Rs 22,214 crore, 22 per cent more than last year.
She has officially said barely 18-20 days of wage labour is provided per rural household under the flagship Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, instead of the stipulated minimum of 100 days in a year. Also, that the share of manufacturing in the state’s domestic product has declined from 19 per cent in 1975-76 to barely 10 per cent (in 2006-07). That 55,000 units in the state had closed during this period.
And, that in 2009-10, the state government’s expenditure on salary, pensions and interest was 12 per cent more than its entire revenue receipts. The debt burden is a cumulative Rs 2 lakh crore.
She told the Commission she was hard at work in wooing investors — she mentioned talks with parties in the US, Singapore, Thailand and Japan in this regard. And, with those at home; GAIL India has apparently told her it would invest Rs 8,000 crore, according to an official.Her aim, she told the Commission, is to attract large private investments to engineering, steel, tea, jute, textiles, mining, power and food processing industries.
Her particular interest, it appears, is in labour-intensive sectors — she mentioned in this regard textiles, apparel, leather, jute, tea, handicrafts, tourism, gems and jewellery and agro-based industries.
She wants a “cluster approach” to cottage and small scale industries and their modernisation. As for reviving closed units, Banerjee said she’d initiated land mapping, setting up of a land bank and framing a land use policy.
She told the Commission her government intended to provide air connectivity from Kolkata to smaller cities such as Haldia, Digha, Shantiniketan, Cooch Behar, Malda and Balurghat. In which regard, she mentioned the tourism potential in areas such as the Sundarbans, Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri. The Sundarbans, she said, could be developed as an ideal tourist destination, as with African safaris. The state government was considering a policy on this.
She also mentioned ‘tea tourism’, saying there was no reason why only Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri should be thought of in this regard. Adding, there was a big opportunity for trans-border tourism development, since West Bengal was the gateway the northeast region, in turn the way to Bhutan, Bangladesh and Nepal.
Similarly, Digha could be developed like Goa, she said. Her government, Banerjee said, had decided to set up a deep sea port for doing business with Bangladesh.
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