Bengal is rolling out the red carpet to entrepreneurs as it looks to shun the anti-business image of the State and attract investments to create jobs. The State government also wants to assuage the pain caused to the Darjeeling tea industry by a long-drawn agitation in the hills.

The year 2017 started on a mixed note with the bullish outcome of the annual Bengal Global Business Summit and a prolonged strike taking a toll on the tea industry.

The annual business summit, an initiative of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to draw investments into the State, was attended by leading industrialists of the country and received investment proposals worth ₹2.35 lakh crore across sectors.

These proposals, Banerjee said, would help the State to shed its image of not being investor- friendly compared to States such as Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu.

Darjeeling imbroglio

However, the Darjeeling tea industry faced a severe crisis during the second flush season after the hills’ political parties led by Gorkha Jan Mukti Morcha (GJMM) called an indefinite strike for statehood from the first week of June this year.

The second flush commands a huge premium in the export markets, particularly the UK and Europe.

The Darjeeling Tea Association (DTA) estimated that the industry was staring at a loss of around ₹250 crore as there was no production and subsequently approached the Tea Board for a financial package.

First, the tea bushes had grown-over and the estates had virtually turned into forests owing to lack of upkeep during the strike. Secondly, the workers had deserted the localities, going away in search of jobs elsewhere.

A comforting news was that IT major Infosys agreed to set up its maiden software development centre in West Bengal without the SEZ tag, which it was seeking for long and had put the project on hold for years. The State government agreed to provide sops to the IT firm.

Infosys centre

IT Minister Bratya Basu had said the advent of Infosys would send a strong message to other IT companies to set up shop in the State.

However, the subsequent blow of the GST left many small businesses in the State in a quandary and many of them had to close down owing to their inability to upload to the GSTN portal.

Banerjee and Finance Minister Amit Mitra had vehemently opposed the ‘hasty’ decision of the Centre to introduce the GST from April and urged the Centre to postpone it till the portal software stabilised.

Recently, Mitra said that GST was causing revenue loss for the States and the compensation amount fixed by the Centre seemed insufficient.

Published on December 28, 2017