West Bengal framing rules to incentivise fresh investment; benefits must match neighbouring states, says FM Swapan Dasgupta

West Bengal Finance Minister Swapan Dasgupta on Wednesday said the government is working on framing the necessary rules to incentivise fresh investment in the State, underlining that, at the outset, such incentives need to be on par with those of neighbouring States like Odisha and Assam to ensure a level playing field for attracting investment.

“I understand that we must make the structure, the government incentives etc on par with the rest of the neighbouring states. So that Assam doesn’t have a disproportionate advantage. Odisha doesn’t benefit too much because we didn’t quite get our sums right. So, we should have a level playing field. And, mercifully today both Odisha and Assam, our immediate two neighbouring states, have grown sufficiently in self-confidence thanks to why we have declined,” Dasgupta said at an Assocham event.

Presenting the first Budget of the new BJP government in the State on Monday, the Finance Minister said the government will introduce a “West Bengal Investment Promotion Framework” to stimulate economic growth, promote industrial investment and generate employment. Its main thrust will be on industrial development through a cluster approach along industrial corridors.

Notably, industry bodies were urging the reinstatement of industrial incentives, which had been withdrawn by the erstwhile Trinamool Congress government, to restore investor confidence and provide policy certainty.

Speaking at the Assocham event, Dasgupta said, “Actually, it is West Bengal which needs to give extra ( incentives to industries compared with Odisha and Assam) just to catch up to where we have gone behind.”

Criticising the previous governments of West Bengal, he said Bengal suffered from deindustrialisation, a unique feature for any State. “We have suffered a problem of woefully mismanaged public finances, which resulted in a crippling public debt. And more importantly we suffered from the problem of a very hostile anti-business environment,” Dasgupta said.

According to him, the most important contribution the new government can make in the coming days is to assure everyone that there is a tectonic shift in West Bengal’s public culture and that, from a position of being contrarian, the State is now part of the mainstream. “We are pro-business and unequivocally so, emphatically so, pro-business. And more importantly, we want to link our economy to the national economy. I think it was that disengagement from the national economy which cost us a lot.”

Dasgupta said a government should be receptive to listening to “legitimate concerns” of different industries and try to address those. “We cannot sit back and say that look we sort of carry the position of neutrality to such an extent. We don’t want to be neutral. We want to be pro-business. And I think that’s the change which we want to see,” the Finance Minister added.

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