The Left and elections in West Bengal

By C.P.CHANDRASEKHAR &
JAYATI GHOSH

The Assembly elections in West Bengal have resulted in the defeat of the Left Front government after 34 years in power. This edition of MacroScan examines votes polled to see whether this actually reflects a big decline in popular support for the Left in the State.

BusinessLine, MacroScan, May 17, 2011

This is clearly an important moment in Indian politics. The dust has still not settled in the five States where elections to the State Assemblies were held, but their impact is already reverberating cross the country. Not just the elections in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Kerala and Puducherry, but even by-election results (as in Kadapa in Andhra Pradesh) may turn out to have national significance for the course of both politics and economic policies at Central and State levels.

The two States where Left Front governments were in power have captured the bulk of media attention.

And within that, the focus has been on West Bengal, not only because of the importance of Left politics in that state for the Left movement in the country as a whole, but because the Left Front government there had managed to win elections for a record seven consecutive elections.

Pyrrhic victory

In Kerala, where incumbent governments have been ejected by voters every five years for nearly four decades, the vote was extremely close and the incumbent Left Democratic Front very nearly made it back to power.

Indeed, the victory of the Opposition may well be seen as pyrrhic because of the likely instability of the future UDF coalition government.

Across the board, it is the Left's loss of State power in West Bengal which is being widely seen as the most devastating and full of portent for the future.

Interestingly, this view seems to be shared by both the opponents and proponents of organised Left parties in the country: that this huge loss shows that the people have decisively rejected the Left Front government, and that the major Left parties (such as the CPI (M) and the CPI will find it impossible to recover from this massive defeat.

In some quarters this is being celebrated; within the Left, there is a sense of desolation and anxiety; in other quarters, more dispassionate observers are concerned about the lack of the moderating power of the Left in preventing a national rightward lurch, particularly in economic policies. Mainstream media responses have contributed to this by talking about “the death of the Left” and similar stereotypical responses. But how much of this is actually justified by the voting patterns that have been revealed in the latest elections?

There is no question that the Left Front government has been handed a resounding defeat, with most Ministers losing their seats and the seat share of the parties involved in the coalition falling to one-third of the former strength in the Assembly.

Extraordinary show

Chart 1 shows the number of Assembly seats held or implicitly garnered by the Left Front in successive elections since its historic seventh victory in 2006. It is clear that there has been a very significant, even dramatic, decline.

But note that the number of seats gained in 2006 represented an extraordinary achievement: 80 per cent of Assembly seats (well over the two-thirds majority) claimed by a government that had already been in power in the State for three decades. This is an achievement unparalleled in independent India, and probably anywhere in the world. It is rare to find a democratically elected government that retains power for a second or third term.

When this happens anywhere else in India, the mainstream media are quick to declare it as a victory for good governance, though they have always been much more grudging of Left victories. That the Left Front government in 2006 was able to retain power to garner a record seventh term and even add to its tally of Assembly seats compared to 2001 indicates that it had an appeal among the electorate that was both unprecedented and remarkable.

Factors at play

Some would argue that the sharp decline in the number of seats thereafter suggests that the government then squandered this advantage.

Certainly the causes for the decline can and will be analysed threadbare inside and outside the various parties that formed the Left Front government. Many factors must have played roles, of which the poor handling of the policy of land acquisition for industrialisation is the one that is most commonly cited.

The proactive coming together of all sorts of disparate and otherwise conflicting political elements at both Centre and State level, with the sole aim of dislodging the Left from its bastion, was also definitely important.

But the combination of complacency and exhaustion that can be created by 34 years of uninterrupted rule should not be underplayed either.

This combination was evident to many external observers. Of course it was then rudely shocked by the experience of the 2009 general elections.

But it may be that the subsequent attempts at political revival among Left supporters were too belated and inadequate to cope with what is only a very natural human desire among the people for political change, even if the nature of that change is unpredictable or problematic.

But does this mean that the people of the State have decisively rejected the politics of the Left?

41% of votes

A detailed look at voting shares provides a more nuanced understanding. Chart 2 indicates that even in this latest Assembly election, when the verdict of the electorate appears to be so decisive against the incumbent government, the Left parties still managed to garner more than 41 per cent of the votes. This is still no mean achievement for a government that has been in power for nearly 35 years.

To put this into perspective, it should be noted that most State governments in India are holding on to power on the basis of much smaller vote shares, generally well below 40 per cent.

This includes the Congress government in Andhra Pradesh (whose position appears much more tenuous after the Kadapa by-election) and the Congress-NCP coalition government in Maharashtra.

This also includes the Nitish Kumar government in Bihar, which is the mainstream media's current favourite and is being portrayed as a model for Mamata Banerjee to follow. It is only because politics in West Bengal (as in Kerala) is much more polarised between two contending groups that the first-past-the-post system does not generate parties that can come to power with relatively small shares of the vote.

It may be more surprising that in terms of the actual number of votes polled, the Left Front has significantly improved upon its performance in the 2009 general elections, and has even come close to the number of votes it managed to get in its record-breaking seventh victory in 2006. Chart 3 shows that in this Assembly election, the Left Front managed to attract nearly 1.1 million additional voters compared to 2009.

Not only was the Left Front vote in 2011 very close to that in 2006, this increase was almost equal to the extent by which the Left Front had fallen short of the votes of the TMC-Congress combine in 2009.

Reasons for optimism

This helps explain the optimism that was evident among Left party cadres just before the results were declared.

This may partly reflect the disconnect between the parties and the people, as a result of which they did not anticipate the electoral debacle. It can also be partly understood when it is recognised that in fact many more people actually did come out to vote for Left parties than had done so in 2009. The disconnect partly comes from the fact that the party cadre apparently did not anticipate that many more people would turn out to vote for the Opposition.

Overall, there was a significant increase in the number of votes cast overall between 2009 and 2011, of nearly 4.8 million votes according to the Election Commission's preliminary estimates. This was in part because of a 3.7 million increase in size of the electorate, i.e. new young voters, and in part because voter turnout increased sharply.

The difference in this election is really that the Opposition combine of Trinamool and Congress parties managed to swing a much larger share of these new voters to vote for change in government.

New voters

Chart 4 shows that of the additional votes cast, the Left Front managed to get less than a quarter, and that nearly three-quarters accrued to the Opposition combine. It is also worth noting that more than half the new voters were women. Firstly, the number of women on electoral rolls increased somewhat more than men; and secondly, more of them voted than before.

While the male voting percentage increased from 82.3 per cent to 84.4 per cent, the female turnout went up from 80.3 per cent to 84.5 per cent, exceeding male turnout in a State where traditionally voter turnout amongst women voters has been much less than among men.

This is obviously a major aspect that the Left needs to introspect on. Whatever one may think of the result, there can be no denying that this shows that Indian electoral democracy is among the most vibrant in the world.

Obviously none of this changes the basic reality of this particular State Assembly election – that it has involved a major defeat for the Left that may have far-reaching implications.

But it can by no means be taken as showing that there is massive dimunition in Left support among the people of West Bengal.

Certainly it is not just premature but downright wrong to write off the Left as a major political force.

This result too is likely to have a significant bearing on how politics evolves in the State in future.

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/columns/c-p-chandrasekhar/article2023879.ece

West Bengal’s health secret

By Jayati Ghosh

For at least the past year, and probably more, media reports about West Bengal have generally been negative. There are many reasons for this, and the merits or demerits of those perceptions and arguments can be debated. But quite apart from the debates about land acquisition for industrialisation, there have been other accusations levelled by an increasingly strident and now more confident Opposition, about the various failures of the state government.

It is certainly true that despite some remarkable successes in land distribution, decentralisation and power to panchayats, and so on, various observers had identified lacklustre performance in health and education as major concerns.The good news is that this picture has changed, especially for health in the past decade. Recent data from the office of the Registrar-General of India, using the Sample Registration System (SRS), shows that West Bengal is now one of the best-performing states in the country in terms of the most basic health indicators.These show that the demographic transition in West Bengal has proceeded more rapidly than for India as a whole, and in a positive direction. In terms of both crude birth rates and crude death rates, the improvement has been significantly greater than for India as a whole, even though the state already had lower rates than the Indian average.

As a result, among the major states, West Bengal in 2008 had the fourth lowest birth rate (after Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Punjab) and the lowest death rate among the major states, even lower than that of Kerala. What is also noteworthy is that the state’s rural-urban gap appears to have been closing with respect to the death rate. In 2008, the rural death rate in West Bengal was 6.1 compared to the urban rate of 6.6 (a gap of 7.5 per cent), whereas for India as a whole it was eight in rural areas compared to 5.9 in urban areas (a gap of 26.2 per cent). Even Tamil Nadu, the state that has otherwise performed very well in health indicators, shows a rural-urban gap in the death rate of 23 per cent.

The infant mortality rate (IMR) — expressed as the ratio of the number of deaths of infants of one-year-old or less per 1,000 live births — is often regarded as the single most important indicator of overall health conditions in a particular area. The relatively rapid decline in IMRs in West Bengal (by 57 per cent, compared to the all-India average decline of 34 per cent) has made it one of the best performing among major states with respect to this indicator. The IMR in 2008 in West Bengal was 35, putting it in fourth position after Kerala, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. The rural-urban gap in the IMR has also improved, from 26 per cent in 1997 to 21 per cent in 2008, compared to the all-India gaps of 42 per cent in 1997 and 38 per cent in 2008.Further, throughout this period West Bengal has had a very low gender gap in IMR, thereby making it very different from several other states of the country.

This is also confirmed by other survey data — for example, the various rounds of the National Family Health Surveys (NFHS) have found the gender gap in IMR in West Bengal to be either the lowest or among the lowest in the country.The maternal mortality ratio (MMR) is the rate of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births among women aged 15-49 years. MMRs have been declining faster and are now lower in West Bengal (141) than the national average (264). The lifetime risk of maternal death (the probability that at least one woman of reproductive age of 15-49 years will die during or just after childbirth) was only 0.3 per cent in West Bengal in 2004-06, compared to 0.7 per cent for all-India and 0.2 per cent in the best-performing state, Kerala.Obviously, while these improvements are praiseworthy, there is still a long way to go in terms of improving even these basic health indicators.

The differences between West Bengal and the best performing state Kerala remain substantial, suggesting that appropriate policy interventions can continue to make significant improvements in these indicators.

But the question remains: what accounts for this recent improvement in health indicators, especially in relation to the rest of the country other than Tamil Nadu? A number of possible explanations can be considered.First, there has been a general improvement in institutional conditions, especially in the West Bengal countryside, in terms of the number of hospitals and health facilities and the increase in access of women to antenatal and post-natal services. This has been enabled not only by increased public expenditure in certain areas, but also by a programme of more decentralised public health delivery, with greater autonomy given to local and village health committees in terms of spending and care systems.

Thus, the NFHS have found that there was a gradual increase in the percentage of mothers who made at least three antenatal visits during their last birth in West Bengal, from 50.3 per cent in 1992-93 to 62.4 per cent in 2005-06. This compares favourably with the national averages, which were significantly lower.Second, since health is intimately related to both sanitation and nutrition, some improvement in both of these variables is also likely to have played a positive role. The extension of better sanitation facilities to rural areas has accelerated, even though overall these facilities still remain inadequate. It is likely that the improvement in both IMR and MMR has been most marked in those districts where the sanitation programme has been more successful.

Similarly, targeted schemes for maternal nutrition, implemented through the Integrated Child Development Services and other programmes, are also likely to have had positive impact.Clearly, therefore, there are signs of substantial progress in basic health indicators in West Bengal in recent years. The question of why these have gone largely unnoticed in both the national and the state-level media is of course an entirely different issue.

Published on The Asian Age (http://www.asianage.com/)

Source URL: http://www.asianage.com/opinion/west-bengal%E2%80%99s-health-secret-727

Violence against the organised Left in West Bengal

By Jayati Ghosh

The appalling violence that has been unleashed against Left cadres and other innocent citizens in West Bengal is not just deeply disturbing in its own right. It is also a sickening reminder of the dreadful period of the 1970s. At that time, when the Left Front was still essentially an incipient political force and there was fierce contestation for state power, West Bengal was the site of the most noxious and vicious targeted violence against Left individuals, aided and abetted by the then government at the Centre. When the Left targets started retaliating, West Bengal became the terrain of dreadful and continuous violence between groups.

All this happened more than thirty years ago, and therefore most people involved in the current violence – whether as perpetrators or victims – did not experience it, do not remember it and at best are only dimly aware of those terrible years. This forgetfulness is itself is a triumph of the Left movement and indeed of the Left Front government in the state – that it succeeded in bringing peace to a very troubled and violent state, and that too for an extended period of more than three decades. This success has been ignored in much of the current political discourse and media analysis, and indeed has not even been adequately recognised by those within the Left Front themselves.

Of course this does not mean that there was no violence at all in this period, or even that the state government succeeded in completely eliminating all forms of politically motivated aggression. But certainly the appalling tension and corrosive political violence of the early 1970s appeared to have become a thing of the past. West Bengal was also remarkable among most other states in the country in keeping at bay the communal and caste-based conflict that has become endemic to many other states in the country.

This remarkable achievement has clearly been undermined in the recent past, partly because of some mistakes made by the state government, but even more so because of the cynical manipulation of people’s sentiments by the political opposition.

The “Maoist” takeover of Lalgarh and the need to bring in large numbers of state and central paramilitary forces to bring back normal administration in the area is only one example of this, even though it has received the greatest prominence in the national media. But the violence and targeted damage to life and public and personal property have not been limited to this kind of declaration of “liberated zones”.

After the election results, across the state, Left supporters, and particularly members and sympathisers of the CPI(M) have been brutally attacked, assassinated, severely wounded, and their personal property destroyed. The presumption of the attackers apparently is that their victims will not retaliate in kind. Of course that is absolutely correct, since it is clear at least to the Left parties as well as to all right-thinking people that to do so would only cause descent into the worst kind of destructive chaos.

But this restraint should not be interpreted to mean that the state government will remain helpless and inactive in the face of post-election disorder. The operations in Lalgarh have already shown that the state government has been forced to take on the local violence there through its own quasi-military operations. But elsewhere in the state as well, the horrific proliferation of violent attacks also has to be dealt with sternly and quickly.

This is where the role of the opposition parties in the state, the central government, and indeed the national media, all assume so much significance. It is no secret that much of the recent violence has come directly from members or supporters of the Trinamool Congress. It is also no secret that the so-called Maoists in some districts have been first openly and then tacitly supported by the Trinamool Congress, which is reported to have also provided financial and other support to such groups in the past, with the single-point agenda of destroying stability in the state and somehow forcing the collapse of the elected Left Front government.

And the mainstream media has displayed remarkable double standards about the violence in West Bengal and the state response to it. In any other state, such violence would have been immediately condemned. But for West Bengal, the rules are apparently different. On the one hand, there have been calls for the resignation of the state government on grounds of lack of legitimacy because of the recent election results, and a presumption that open violence targeting Left cadre is only to be expected; and on the other hand the government has been pilloried for inaction, when it is well-known that an immediate firm response would have been immediately condemned as being too heavy-handed and aggressive.

But the media response is deeply disingenuous. It is certainly true that the recent election has been a major setback for the Left and especially the CPI(M) and especially in West Bengal. There is correctly introspection and acceptance of the need for course correction.

Yet the extent of the setback also should not be overplayed. With all its flaws and errors of omission and commission, which the party and the ruling state government have themselves accepted, the Left still commands a lot of electoral support in West Bengal. The latest results from the Election Commission show that the CPI(M) got 33.1 per cent of all the votes cast, and together with its other Left Front allies, got 43.3 per cent of the votes. This is only 1.3 percentage points less than the Trinamool Congress (31.18 per cent) and Congress Party (13.45 per cent) taken together. This hardly qualifies as cause for rejection of the state government, and certainly cannot possibly justify any targeted violence against state cadre.

The central government has also played an unsavoury role in the recent violence, with its slow response to the desperate pleas for outside support to control the violence and its implicit encouragement of forces that are out to destroy the Left Front. The cynical attempt to use those who see themselves as “ultra-left” to destroy the Left clearly has wider backing, including from imperialist forces that have not forgiven the Left for its principled opposition to the Indo-US nuclear deal and similar alliances.

But this is not just short-sighted, it is also deeply dangerous. The central government too must recognise that allowing this to continue would backfire on itself, much in the same way that Indira Gandhi’s encouragement of the Sikh extremist Bhindranwale in the early 1980s, in order to annoy the opposition party in Punjab, ultimately backfired quite viciously on the Congress Party and the central government.

Land Reforms in West Bengal and Public Perceptions

By Jayati Ghosh

Such is the power of the media, that in recent months, the very names of Singur and Nandigram in West Bengal have become synonymous with forcible land acquisition by the state all over India. This is truly remarkable, because in fact no land was ever actually acquired for industrialisation in Nandigram after the violent protests against it. And it is widely acknowledged that the terms of acquisition of the 1000 acres required for the Tata automobile factory in Singur were the most favourable for the peasantry, of any such acquisition across India. Indeed, the Singur model ought to be viewed far more favourably, if only because it is the first time that not just owners of land but also tenant farmers were sought to be given some compensation.In a more rational socio-political environment, the response of the state government would have been appreciated in both these cases. In Nandigram, the government of West Bengal actually changed its plans for creating an industrial hub in that area, and declared that it would not go ahead with any attempt at land acquisition. This is unlike any other state government, and is surely noteworthy in a country in which more than 200,000 hectares of cultivable land has been compulsorily acquired by the state for non-agricultural uses just in the past three years, without heeding local or other protests. (The subsequent year-long turmoil in Nandigram had nothing to do with land acquisition but was the result of forcible eviction of one set of peasants by another, and unlawful blockade of the area.) In Singur the state government provided three times the market price of the land to holders of land titles and extended compensation to recorded tenants – both of which occurred for the first time in any state.Despite this, violent protests have continued in both areas, fuelled not only by the opposition within the state but by interested outside parties that would like to undermine the Left Front government for various reasons, and by a hysterical media that has blatantly misrepresented facts even while ignoring far more serious violations of human rights in many other states where land acquisition has been proceeding apace. The smear campaign of the media has had its effect. It is a major irony of our times that the state government that has done – and continues to do – more than any other to enforce land ceilings and redistribute land to the poor, is the one that faced the most vilification for land acquisition, even when that land has not even been acquired.And in the process, the genuine achievements of the Left Front government in the area of land relations, even in the very recent past and up to the present, have been completely ignored. But in fact, the record of the Government of West Bengal in terms of land distribution remains not only laudable, but also far more impressive than that of any other state government in India. The only states that come close are those that have been or are ruled by other Left Front governments, that is Kerala and Tripura. What should be particularly noted, especially by those elements in the media who now regularly berate the Government of West Bengal for its recent attempts to acquire land for industrialisation, is that its efforts at land distribution continue even today. This has become very clear from data recently collected from the Land and Land Reforms Department of the Government of West Bengal (cited by V. K. Ramachandran, “Land reforms continues in West Bengal”, The Hindu 23 August 2008).Remember that since 1977, West Bengal has distributed more land than any other state and accounts for 22 per cent of all the land distributed in India. And it has provided this to by far the largest number of beneficiaries. In fact, the 29.7 lakh beneficiaries of land reform in West Bengal account for 55 per cent of all the beneficiaries in India!This process of land distribution continued even in the very recent past, precisely the period when the state government was being accused of seeking to deprive peasants of their land because of its industrialisation drive. In the three years between 2005-06 and 2007-08, nearly 30,000 acres was distributed to landless peasant cultivators. This was three times the amount that was acquired by the state government for all purposes, including road building and other development. In 2007-08, the same year when the violent agitation in Nandigram was grabbing national headlines, no one bothered to report that the same state government had distributed nearly 11,000 acres, to more than 25,000 peasants. This experience must be contrasted with most of the rest of India. Not only has hardly any land been distributed in the past three years in most other states, but land has been compulsorily acquired at breakneck speed not only for SEZs, but also for urban expansion and other infrastructure development. Maharashtra, Karnataka, Haryana and Andhra Pradesh stand out in this list. But there is no noise at all in the media about either the terms or the conditions of the land acquisition in these states, which in all cases has been significantly worse for the local peasantry than the compensation received in Singur. Nor have the same activists who regularly still congregate in Singur and Nandigram to spew venom on the Left Front government engage in remotely similar activities in these states. The entire opposition and fury of protestors seems to be reserved for one of the few state governments that is still trying to redistribute land to the peasants.So it is clear that these protests – and the media attention that they receive – are not completely innocent or principled, since they are not directed at other state governments that have been guilty of much worse. The question that lingers, then, is what the real motive behind such continuing and focussed protests against this one particular state government could be.

Recent Growth in West Bengal

C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh
12.05.2008
(Article posted at MACROSCAN)

For the greater part of the past three decades, West Bengal has been among the middle ranking states of India, both in terms of per capita income and human development indicators. This has been despite the special feature of the state, that it has been ruled continuously by a Left Front government that has provided political stability and also, particularly in the first two decades, a clear orientation towards improving the conditions of workers and peasants.This has made West Bengal the most active state in respect of land reform in the past two decades, leading the rest of the country not only in recording and legal recognition of the rights of sharecroppers but also in enforcing land ceilings and distributing surplus and vested land. (It should be remembered that even now West Bengal distributes more land to landless peasants than it acquires, and certainly distributes more than any other state.) It also made the state a pioneer in the decentralisation of powers to the panchayats, well before the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution encouraged greater devolution in other states as well.While these measures certainly contributed to the breaking of the “agrarian impasse” in Bengal and allowed for more rapid and diversified agricultural performance in the state, in other respects the economic performance of the state has been below expectation. This reflects the inherent difficulty of an autonomous development trajectory within a single state, even with a federal system of government, and the role of broader macroeconomic processes in determining outcomes even within the state.To this must be added several other constraints on growth, which are essentially the effects of history and geography.

At Independence, West Bengal was among the more industrialised states of the country. Subsequently, however, a combination of factors meant that organised manufacturing industry generally stagnated, especially compared to other regions. These included the absence of a local bourgeoisie with an inherent interest in investing within the state; reduction in public investment in railways that had previously encouraged the local engineering industries; and national policies such as the freight equalisation policy that eliminated the state’s regional cost advantages from proximity to coal and steel resources.In addition, West Bengal has been situated in what has been a relatively poor and economically stagnant region of India, such that there have been very few economic growth stimuli coming from the surrounding region. Indeed, for the better part of the past two decades the economy of West Bengal has been the only dynamic one in the region.

Despite these constraints, it is not generally known that over the 1990s West Bengal was one of the fastest growing states in India, and actually showed the second highest rate of aggregate SDP growth among major states, after Karnataka. This tendency was even more marked in per capita terms, because West Bengal has been successful in controlling fertility to a greater extent than many other states.While agricultural output growth was the dominant reason for this, industrial output also grew rapidly, not so much in the organised sector but in the non-registered and unorganised manufacturing industries that proliferated as a consequence of greater rural prosperity.

For the past decade, West Bengal has had the largest number of and the most rapid growth in small-scale and cottage industries among all the states of India.However, much like small manufacturing elsewhere in the country, such small units in West Bengal have recently been adversely affected by neo-liberal economic policies implemented by the central government, which have led to rising costs and greater competition from both organised manufacturing and liberalised imports. The negative fallout of these processes on small manufacturers and traders has been particularly evident since the start of the current decade.These tendencies in turn form the backdrop to the new industrialisation strategy of the Government of West Bengal especially since 2004, which has sought to engage, attract and provide incentives for large corporate capital in order to increase the rate of industrial investment. This article considers the available evidence on growth trends in the state since 1999-2000.

Chart 1 indicates that after 1999-2000, West Bengal was growing slightly faster than India as a whole in per capita terms until 2004-05, after which its expansion has been slightly less rapid but still creditable. The per capita income of West Bengal is now slightly lower than the national average.Charts 2a and 2b show that growth up to 2004-05 was accompanied by even more rapid changes in the sectoral composition of output than have occurred in the rest of India. As for India as a whole, the share of the secondary sector has remained almost constant, increasing only very slightly. But the share of the primary sector (which in West Bengal is dominantly agriculture) has shrunk by as much as 7 percentage points in just five years, with the gap being taken up by services expansion.

Within services, only a few sub-sectors account for this growing share. The transport and communications sectors, trade, hotels and restauranats and public administration and community services have actually fallen in terms of share of State Domestic Product in these five years. However, banking and other financial services and real estate and business services have increased their respective shares sharply.The critical issue from the point of view of well-being of the people, of course, is how far the changes in sectoral composition of output have involved changes in employment patterns as well. Therefore, Table 1 presents some calculations of the relative shares in output and employment by major sectors in 1999-2000 and 2004-05, using NSS estimates based on the two recent large-sample Employment and Unemployment Surveys.

Table 1: Recent structural changes in output and employment in West Bengal

NSSO Employment and Unemployment 55th and 61st Rounds for work force data, referring to Usual Status Workers (Principal plus Subsidiary).
The evidence presented in Table 1 is disconcerting. While the share of the primary sector in outout has fallen sharply, as noted above, its share in employment has barely changed at all, and it continues to account for around 46-47 per cent of the work force. This is also true of India as a whole, of course, although the absolute share of the primary sector in employment is lower in West Bengal (at less than half of all workers), and the decline in share has also been smaller than in the average for India.But the manufacturing sector has also declined in relative importance, to some extent in terms of the share of output and even more in terms of the proportion of workers engaged in such activity. Meanwhile, the services sectors that have accounted for the biggest increases in share of output have increased their share of employment to a much lesser extent. In particular, financial, real estate and business services accounted for 23 per cent of the State Domestic Product in 2004-05, but only 2 per cent of the work force! So both in the manufacturing sector and in the more dynamic services sectors, growth of output has involved very little expansion in employment.This is of course in a nutshell the central problem of development today, not only in West Bengal but in all of India. Clearly it cannot be solved by a concentration only on corporate-driven growth in industry or services, as such investment is typically more capital-intensive and generates less employment per unit of output than investment by smaller producers. So the state government obviously has to develop a multi-pronged strategy for employment generation that encompasses several different approaches.There is a further issue on the nature of recent growth in West Bengal, which is in terms of its regional spread – or rather, the lack of it. Post-1999 income growth has been overwhelmingly concentrated in the metropolitan area of Kolkata and the surrounding hinterland, thereby widening income gaps between Kolkata and the rest of the state that were already very large.Chart 3 show the disparity between per capita income in Kolkata and in all other districts in 2004-05. No other district had a per capita income that was even half of that of Kolkata, not even those that are contiguous or nearby the capital. More than half the districts had per capita incomes of around one-third that of Kolkata, or even less. While it does not appear on the chart, it should also be noted that for almost every district, the per capita income gap with respect to Kolkata has actually widened since 1999-2000, indicating that the recent pattern of economic growth has accentuated spatial inequalities within the state.

Finally, of course, it is well known that growth in aggregate income need not always translate into improvements in material consumption of the people in general. This is evident from a comparison of the per capita income of the districts with estimates of mean per capita consumption obtained from the NSS 61st Round consumer expenditure survey. Table 2 presents this information.The district-level data on per capita consumption is derived by using Small Area Estimation techniques to arrive at estimates with the least variation for each district. They do have a number of limitations, since the sample sizes are generally not large enough to permit generalisation. Nevertheless, the data presented in the table reveal several interesting facts. Firstly, and expectedly, there is substantial variation between the per capita income and mean consumption in general and across districts. Second, in several cases the variation is so large as to change the rank of the district quite significantly, as for example for North 24 Parganas (where the rank improves hugely for per capita consumption) and Jalpaiguri (where the rank falls sharply for per capita consumption).

Table 2: Per capita income and estimated per capita consumption in the districts of West Bengal, 2004-05


While the disparities between Kolkata and the rest of the state in terms of per capita consumption were also large, they were slightly less than has been observed for per capita income. Overall, this table suggests the need for caution in interpreting per capita District Domestic Product as an accurate indicator of either consumption or overall well-being of the local people. It is evident that the estimated per capita consumption in the different districts was somewhere around one half and one-third of the per capita output. Assuming that workers and small peasants consume all or most of their income (and may even dissave through debt) this suggests a very large share of surplus in the form of profits, rents, etc. This knowledge allows for a further refinement of the basic development question mentioned earlier: how can existing surpluses be tapped and mobilised to ensure both expansion of productive capacity in a way that creates gainful employment opportunities and better material and human development conditions for the people? It is this very difficult question that must be answered if the development strategy of West Bengal government is to be successful in creating unambiguous and widely welcomed gains for the citiziens of the state.

(For table and chart, see www.macroscan.com)

West Bengal sees spurt in growth

By Jayati Ghosh

30 May, 2008

The state of West Bengal has been the focus of national discussion because of the various implications of its proposed industrialisation policy. For the past three decades, West Bengal has been among the middle ranking states of India, in terms of both per capita income and human development indicators. This has been despite the special feature of the state, that it has been ruled continuously by a Left Front government that has provided political stability and also, particularly in the first two decades, a clear orientation towards improving the conditions of workers and peasants.

The Left Front government made West Bengal the most active state in respect of land reform, leading the rest of the country not only in recording and legal recognition of the rights of sharecroppers but also in enforcing land ceilings and distributing surplus and vested land. (It should be remembered that even now the government of West Bengal distributes more land to landless peasants than it acquires, and continues to distribute more than any other state.) The state was also a pioneer in the decentralisation of powers to the panchayats, well before the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution encouraged greater devolution in other states.While these measures certainly contributed to the breaking of the "agrarian impasse" in Bengal and allowed for more rapid and diversified agricultural performance in the state, in other respects the economic performance of the state has been below expectation. This reflects the inherent difficulty of an autonomous development trajectory within a single state, even with a federal system of government, and the role of broader macroeconomic processes in determining outcomes even within the state.To this must be added several other constraints on growth, which are essentially the effects of history and geography.

At Independence, West Bengal was among the more industrialised states of the country. Subsequently, however, a combination of factors meant that organised manufacturing industry generally stagnated, especially compared to other regions. These included the absence of a local bourgeoisie with an inherent interest in investing within the state; reduction in public investment in railways that had previously encouraged the local engineering industries; and national policies such as the freight equalisation policy that eliminated the state’s regional cost advantages from proximity to coal and steel resources.

In addition, West Bengal has been situated in what has been a relatively poor and economically stagnant region of India, such that there have been very few economic growth stimuli coming from the surrounding region. Indeed, for the better part of the past two decades the economy of West Bengal has been the only dynamic one in the region.Despite these constraints, it is not generally known that over the 1990s West Bengal was one of the fastest growing states in India, and actually showed the second highest rate of aggregate State Domestic Product growth among major states, after Karnataka. This tendency was even more marked in per capita terms, because West Bengal has been successful in controlling fertility to a greater extent than many other states.While agricultural output growth was the dominant reason for this, industrial output also grew rapidly, not so much in the organised sector but in the non-registered and unorganised manufacturing industries that proliferated as a consequence of greater rural prosperity. For the past decade, West Bengal has had the largest number of and the most rapid growth in small-scale and cottage industries among all the states of India.

However, much like small manufacturing units elsewhere in the country, such small units in West Bengal have recently been adversely affected by neo-liberal economic policies implemented by the Centre, which have led to rising costs and greater competition from both organised manufacturing and liberalised imports. The negative fallout of these processes on small manufacturers and traders has been particularly evident since the start of the current decade.These tendencies in turn form the backdrop to the new industrialisation strategy of the government of West Bengal especially since 2004, which has sought to engage, attract and provide incentives for large corporate capital in order to increase the rate of industrial investment.

From 1999-2000 to 2004-05, West Bengal grew slightly faster than India as a whole in per capita terms, but thereafter its expansion has been slightly less rapid. The per capita income of West Bengal is now slightly lower than the national average.This growth was accompanied by even more rapid changes in the sectoral composition of output than have occurred in the rest of India. The share of the secondary sector has been almost unchanged at 18-19 per cent. But the share of the primary sector (which in West Bengal is dominantly agriculture) has shrunk from 34 to 27 per cent points in just five years, with the gap being taken up by services expansion.But only a few services (banking and other financial services and real estate and business services) have increased their share of income. Other services like transport and communications, trade, hotels and restaurants, and public administration and community services have actually "fallen" in terms of share of SDP in these five years.The critical issue from the point of view of well-being of the people is the extent to which changes in output share have led to changes in employment over the same period.

On this the evidence is disconcerting. Even though the primary sector’s share of output fell sharply, its share in employment has barely changed at all, and it continues to account for around 46-47 per cent of the work force. The manufacturing sector shows a slight decline in terms of the share of output and a bigger decline in terms of the proportion of workers.Meanwhile, the services sectors that have accounted for the biggest increases in share of output have hardly increased their share of employment. In particular, financial, real estate and business services accounted for 23 per cent of the SDP in 2004-05, but only two per cent of the work force.

So both in the manufacturing sector and in the more dynamic services sectors, growth of output has involved very little expansion in employment.This discrepancy between output and employment is of course the central problem of development today, not only in West Bengal but in all of India. Clearly it cannot be solved by a concentration only on corporate-driven growth in industry or services, even if this forms one part of the strategy. This is because corporate investment is typically more capital-intensive and generates less employment per unit of output than investment by smaller producers. So there is need for the state government (as well as the Central government, of course) to develop a multi-pronged strategy for employment generation that encompasses several different approaches.

There is a further issue on the regional spread of recent growth in West Bengal. Income growth after 1999-2000 has been overwhelmingly concentrated in the metropolitan area of Kolkata and the surrounding hinterland, thereby widening income gaps between Kolkata and the rest of the state that were already very large. In 2004-05 no other district had a per capita income that was even half of that of Kolkata. More than half the districts had per capita incomes of around one-third that of Kolkata, or even less. For almost every district, the per capita income gap with respect to Kolkata has widened over this period.It is well known that growth in aggregate income need not always translate into improvements in material consumption of the people in general. This is evident from the estimate of per capita consumption obtained from the NSS 61st Round survey, which is well below half the per capita income of the state. Assuming that workers and small peasants consume all or most of their income (and may even dissave through debt) this suggests a very large share of surplus in the form of profits, rents, etc.This knowledge allows for a further refinement of the basic development question mentioned earlier: how can existing surpluses be tapped and mobilised to ensure both expansion of productive capacity in a way that creates gainful employment opportunities and better material and human development conditions for the people?

It is this very difficult question that must be answered if the development strategy of West Bengal government is to be successful in creating unambiguous and widely welcomed gains for the citizens of the state.