Three decades and more of CPI(M) rule in Bengal has left Calcutta (I prefer the name over the post-colonial Kolkata which was the Bengali pronunciation anyway) a shadow of a metropolitan city. More than three years ago, I had migrated to this city from the cosmopolitan environs of Shillong in search of better academic opportunities. Better opportunities I certainly did get, and am grateful. However, over the course of these years, the city has assimilated me and I have assimilated the city. Confirmation towards the same lies in the fact that I am cribbing about the city in puro Bangali style today.
Having lived in a small city throughout my childhood and adolescence, and then spent a significant amount of time in a metropolitan city, I suppose I am well placed to say that Calcutta now resembles a giant small city today. Small city, of course, in terms, of the advanced opportunities for growth that the city affords its citizens. I would have many sympathisers among my readers if I rhetorically stated that ‘nothing happens in Calcutta‘. Indignants Calcuttans may point at the recent Poets of the Fall concert or simply say that ‘amra alada’ (we are different). But that does not discount the fact that the lack of industrial activity in the state has left its once-proud commercial hub of a capital rather insignificant. In its place, upstarts like Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune have run away on the fast lane towards claiming themselves as one of India‘s few metros.
The problems are to do with faulty economic policy, among others. To maintain a false sense of empathy towards the teeming poor of the state, the CPI(M) embarked on an irresponsible spree of populism. Consider the transportation scene in Calcutta today. The last bus fare hike took place on July 1, 2009, when a litre of diesel would cost Rs 35.03. A typical bus can take you from one end of the city to the other for not much more than Rs. 8. Which is great to hear, but then, fuel prices haven’t exactly been stagnant over the past few years. They have risen steadily to Rs. 44.76 now, a rise of 28% in three years. But fares have remained stagnant under pressure from governments not having the balls to take hard decisions. Instead, bus operators have been subsidised for years at the cost of who else, the public exchequer! I would have even accepted this elaborate process of progressive income redistribution had its economic fundamentals been sound. On the other hand, West Bengal today has an astronomical debt of Rs. 1,92,000 crores (as in 2011). The cost of populism fed to the masses in the name of socialism, you might say.
carvaan 