The Pulse | Politics | South Asia

Why Did West Bengal Decline, and Can the BJP Revive It?

The state’s woes are of its own making. Since independence, successive governments implemented policies that repelled foreign investment.

The Bandel Thermal Power Station, a coal-based power plant at Tribeni, Hooghly in West Bengal, India.

The message in the recent defeat of the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Indian state of West Bengal is clear:  the people of West Bengal want a shot at reversing their state’s long-term decline.

West Bengal is the western half of the Bengal region — the other half being Bangladesh — that has long been one of South Asia’s richest areas. The election reflects the desire on the part of the population for change and economic development.

Long an economic and cultural powerhouse, West Bengal’s ailment has lasted several decades. Between 1960 and 2024, its proportion of the national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell from 10.5 percent to 5.6 percent. Recent estimates rank its GDP per capita at around the 23rd or 24th of India’s 36 states and union territories (UTs), behind states that used to be much poorer than it, such as Rajasthan and Odisha. Its Human Development Index (HDI) rank is also abysmal; it ranks 27th amongst Indian states and UTs.

The prosperity of West Bengal is important not only for the sake of its own people, but because the state is the natural hub and port for the entirety of eastern India. Eastern India’s economic stagnation compared to the rest of India is partially a function of West Bengal’s underperformance, which pulls down Bihar, Assam, and Odisha along with it.

What happened to West Bengal? Colonialism alone does not fully explain the decline of West Bengal. After all, while all of India was under British rule or suzerainty, different states today have wildly varying developmental outcomes. Furthermore, the eastern half of Bengal, Bangladesh, has a booming, export-oriented economy. West Bengal’s woes are of its own making: it implemented poor policies after India’s independence in 1947.

During the Mughal Era, Bengal became the richest part of India. In pre-modern times, a region’s wealth was most often a function of its population size and how much land it had under cultivation. These factors enabled not only taxation — and subsequently, great revenues — but surplus food and labor that could be used in other sectors of the economy. Many historians refer to Mughal-era Bengal as a proto-industrial economy. This meant that a large proportion of the population was employed in industry, but in the form of rural handicraft production rather than the factory-driven production that characterizes modern industrialization. According to the historian William Dalrymple, in the 18th century:

With [Bengal’s] myriad weavers – 25,000 in Dhaka alone – and unrivalled luxury textile production of silks and woven muslins of fabulous delicacy, it was by the end of the seventeenth century Europe’s single most important supplier of goods in Asia and much the wealthiest region of the Mughal Empire…. One single market near Murshidabad was said alone to handle 650,000 tons of rice annually. The region’s export products – sugar, opium and indigo, as well as the textiles produced by its 1 million weavers – were desired all over the world….

With [Bengal’s] myriad weavers – 25,000 in Dhaka alone – and unrivalled luxury textile production of silks and woven muslins of fabulous delicacy, it was by the end of the seventeenth century Europe’s single most important supplier of goods in Asia and much the wealthiest region of the Mughal Empire…. One single market near Murshidabad was said alone to handle 650,000 tons of rice annually. The region’s export products – sugar, opium and indigo, as well as the textiles produced by its 1 million weavers – were desired all over the world….

Bengal also did well under the British Raj, becoming the powerhouse of their Indian Empire. The British ruled the subcontinent from Calcutta (modern Kolkata) for almost 200 years, until 1911. On one hand, the British were notoriously linked to the deindustrialization of India — because factories put local, cottage industries out of business — and to a number of famines in Bengal itself, including the great famines of 1770 and 1943. On the other hand, the British also introduced modern industry, technology, and transportation to India. The Bengal Presidency, being the hub of British India, received much of this investment. At the time of India’s independence and Bengal’s partition, West Bengal’s industrial capacity was the highest among Indian states.

Partition, along with the influx of refugees and the severance from some of its agricultural markets in East Bengal, dampened West Bengal’s prospects. The ruling Indian National Congress (INC) did not help the state much, preferring to direct........

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