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Bengal was the undisputed industry leader in India. Why did it lose its way? asked Vajpayee

On 16 July 2003, PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee addressed the Bengal Chamber of Commerce & Industry on its 150th anniversary in Kolkata, underlining West Bengal’s industrial decline while urging the state govt to create a business-friendly environment.

It gives me great pleasure to be with you this morning to celebrate a landmark year in the life of an institution that has contributed so much to the city of Kolkata, to the State of West Bengal, and to the entire Eastern region. The very fact that the Bengal Chamber of Commerce & Industry has completed 150 years is proof that Bengal has truly been the pioneer of industrialisation in India. It means that nearly a century before India became independent, this city and this State had already taken to the high road of industry and commerce.

India’s cultural, intellectual and industrial resurgence began from Bengal. The great reformers, philosophers and poets who were born here provided leadership in thought and action to various socio-political movements. Just as all the tributaries of the Ganga merge into it to make it a mighty river, all these movements joined the mainstream of the nationalist struggle, imparting considerable strength and vitality to it. Bengal achieved a synthesis between the spiritual nationalism of Swami Vivekananda, humanism of Gurudev Tagore, scientific temper of Jagdish Chandra Bose, and political radicalism of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose.

Thus, in the closing decades of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century, Bengal became the cultural, educational and industrial capital of India. Such was its fame and reputation those days that Bengal’s prowess gained a legendary aura around it. “What Bengal thinks today, the rest of India will think tomorrow,” it used to be said.

I am recalling this hoary past of Kolkata and Bengal for two purposes. First, I wish to join all of you in paying my tributes to all the pioneers in the saga of Bengal’s industrialization. Secondly, past achievements serve as a useful benchmark to judge the present and as a source of inspiration to plan for the future.

Bengal was the undisputed leader and promoter of industrial culture in India till the late 1960s. Why did it lose its way thereafter? From a position of number one in the early post-Independence period, it declined to a position somewhere in middle by the close of the century. As recently as 1981, West Bengal’s per capita income was above the national average. Two decades later, it fell below the national average. Why did this happen? Why did businesses leave Bengal? Why did new investments skip........

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