Showing posts with label PRABHAT PATNAIK. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PRABHAT PATNAIK. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Three Decades of Left Front Rule in Bengal
By Prabhat Patnaik
THE Left Front’s completion of three decades in office in West Bengal by winning every single popular election since 1977 naturally raises the question: how has this been possible? A phenomenon such as this does not belong to the realm of the “small change of politics” (to use BTR’s phrase). It can occur only under certain specific historical circumstances, namely when the political formation in question comes to power in the midst of an acute social crisis and is successful in leading society out of that crisis. And this is exactly what the Left Front in West Bengal has done.
The acute social crisis that had come to a head in West Bengal in the mid-seventies can be traced back to its colonial past. Bengal was the first region in India to be colonised by the British and faced the massive impact of the drain of wealth that began immediately after Plassey. This impact, whose manifestations were de-industrialisation, impoverishment of the people, and a string of famines, which lasted almost till the end of British rule, also altered the structure of the economy in crucial ways. The Permanent Settlement of 1793, a mechanism erected for effecting the drain, did not just create a class of parasitic intermediaries. It also entailed an almost total absence of investment by the colonial rulers in irrigation or the agricultural sector (since such investment yielded no additional revenues to them). This, in the context of the acute pressure of population on land that de-industrialisation generated, meant agricultural stagnation, and an intense exploitation of the peasantry through rack-renting. The abysmal state of the peasantry worsened further in the period of the Great Depression when the decline in the terms of trade greatly increased peasant indebtedness and loss of land. Even though sporadic efforts had been made to provide some succour to the peasantry before independence (for instance by the Fazlul Haq ministry), the situation continued to remain grim. The last straw was the huge burden of financing Britain’s war against Japan, which was unjustly put on India as a whole but affected Bengal to the greatest extent, trebling the price of rice in less than two years and resulting in three million famine deaths with another half a million rural households being reduced to beggary.
ROOTS OF SOCIAL CRISIS
The post-independence land reforms of the Congress government, even though they broke the power of the erstwhile zamindars, succeeded only in strengthening the class of jotedars which had come up just below this layer and had become the real centre of local power even before the end of the colonial era. No doubt some rich peasants moved up into the category of owners from that of tenants, but the bulk of the toiling peasantry remained steeped in misery. And once the easy prospects of increasing cropping intensity had got exhausted by the end of the fifties, the agrarian crisis resurfaced in all its old ferocity, to a point where it was almost taken for granted by scholars, both in India and abroad, that Bengal had reached an agrarian impasse.
The industrial front too presented a cheerless picture. Old industries like jute which had come up in the colonial era faced bleak prospects. The engineering industry, which had surfaced towards the end of the colonial era and prospered for a while on the basis of catering to government orders, especially of the railways, went into terminal illness with the mid-sixties recession which marked the end of the era of active public investing. The Freight Equalisation Scheme ensured that the edge that Bengal would normally have enjoyed in a whole range of new industries because of proximity to coal and iron ore reserves, got blunted. For all these reasons, in the case of industry too, as in agriculture, it appeared to be the end of the road for Bengal.
The social crisis was born out of this impasse. The peasantry was mired in poverty and stagnation, with little prospects for improving its position; the working class, employed largely in industries which were declining, faced unemployment and ruin; and the urban middle class faced bleak job prospects. The situation was explosive, and yet attempts by revolutionary extremists to change the situation by force came a cropper. The bourgeois-landlord State sought to control the situation through semi-fascist terror, for which Left extremism provided it with an excuse. It unleashed this terror against the CPI(M) which lost nearly 1200 cadres over a short span of time.
HISTORICAL CONTRIBUTION
The terror in West Bengal provided the backdrop to Indira Gandhi’s infamous Emergency rule, which it preceded and merged into. But the net result of this terror was only to keep the social crisis simmering below the surface. Or to put it differently, on top of the basic social crisis which remained unresolved, West Bengal experienced additionally the impact of Left extremist and semi-fascist violence. It could neither move forward to a revolution, nor carry on in the old way. It was caught in a logjam. The Left Front government which came to power in 1977 broke this logjam; and therein lay its real historical contribution, because of which it has remained dear to the hearts of the people of the state for so long.
In the countryside, it broke the social power of the jotedars. Operation Barga recorded unregistered tenants and thereby gave a legal status to the sharecroppers who until then had been at the complete mercy of the landlords. In fact the term “sharecropper” is a misnomer, since it suggests as if he received a fixed share of the crop; instead, it was typically the landlords’ men who harvested the crop and handed over a pittance to the bargadar who had done the actual cultivating. The Left Front government promulgated a simple rule: whoever cultivated the land was alone entitled to harvest the crop. The harvest therefore went into the bargadar’s possession in the first place, and it was he who then handed over the landlord’s share, against a receipt. This increased the tenant’s income. In addition, by assuring him of a fixed share of the produce, it increased the tenant’s incentive to introduce better agricultural practices and increase output. Moreover, the receipt obtained from the landlord, since it indicated that the tenant had some right over the land, also acted as a collateral for obtaining credit. This improvement in the tenants’ position, together with the distribution of ceiling-surplus land, brought about a change in the correlation of class forces in the countryside which formed the basis for an agricultural revival.
At the same time public investment in agriculture, especially in irrigation, was stepped up greatly. Given the skewed distribution of fiscal resources between the centre and the states, and the centre’s propensity to treat the magnitude of total devolution of resources to the states and their inter se distribution across states, as matters over which it had absolute discretion, the West Bengal government faced severe fiscal punishment for the political sin of being Left. But it fought back vigorously. It championed the rights of the states against the centralisation of fiscal resources and powers, and united state governments to carry forward the fight for a genuinely federal structure. At the same time, notwithstanding the acute fiscal difficulties into which it had been pushed, it ensured substantial increases in plan outlays.
The combination of land reforms and increased public investment in the countryside, made West Bengal, for the decade of the 1980s, the state with the highest rate of growth in agricultural output. During the neo-liberal nineties, agricultural growth declined everywhere in the country, but even so West Bengal’s performance was relatively better. This agricultural revival, and the general re-fashioning of the West Bengal countryside, occurred within a whole new set of institutions, the panchayats, where again West Bengal was a pioneer in the country. Panchayati raj which until then had been a virtually defunct concept, retained by the Congress government in its official documents largely in deference to the Mahatma’s memory, was given a whole new life and became, under a Marxist dispensation, a powerful instrument of democratic decentralisation.
The agricultural revival put purchasing power in the hands of the peasants and labourers and enlarged the domestic rural market, which in turn stimulated significant rural industrialisation. To this was added a whole new set of initiatives on the part of the state government to enlarge the modern industrial base of the state. With the big bourgeoisie chary of investing in West Bengal, these initiatives entrusted the public sector with a leading role, of which the Haldia petrochemical complex, the most ambitious industrial project completed in the state to date, was a direct off-shoot.
CHALLENGE POSED BY NEO-LIBERALISM
The adoption of neo-liberal policies at the centre since 1991 has become a major constraint on the Left front’s pursuit of its old development trajectory. A central feature of that trajectory was active government intervention and investment; but neo-liberalism wants a “withdrawal of the State” (a euphemism for State intervention confining itself to providing “incentives” to domestic and foreign monopolists and financiers). The Left Front government had energised agriculture by freeing the peasantry from jotedar hegemony, by using the government to succour the peasantry against landlords, something which the Nehruvians had only planned on paper but never succeeded in doing; but neo-liberalism wants the peasants to be left to the mercy of the “market forces” which means being hegemonised by corporate capital making encroachments into the agricultural sector.
The Left Front government had given the public sector a prominent role (and has had remarkable success even of late in reviving public sector units); but neo-liberalism wants the State only to promote private corporate capital, both domestic and foreign, through the so-called “public-private partnerships”. The Left Front government had stepped up plan outlays significantly; but neo-liberalism forces expenditure deflation on the State, including on state governments, through inter alia the so-called fiscal responsibility legislation (which West Bengal has held out against till now). In short, neo-liberalism poses a major challenge for the pursuit of a Left development strategy at the state level, such as underlay the remarkable success of the Left Front government.
This challenge however has to be met and overcome. There are still enough possibilities within the system which can be used. For instance, the Central Sector Schemes (which the centre itself formulates on the implicit assumption that they would remain unutilised) can be fully utilised to the benefit of the poor. A bold and imaginative fiscal effort can be made, which can frustrate the neo-liberal policy of imposing expenditure deflation on state governments. The public sector can be brought back as a counter-weight to private corporate capital, by converting even small budgetary resources into large investible funds through imaginative methods of financial leveraging. This counter-weight can be used to place a clear limit on the extent to which the state government can accommodate the demands of would-be private investors, and to specify clear criteria, protective of the interests of the basic classes against corporate encroachment, on the basis of which alone approval can be given to such investors.
In short, the scope still exists to ensure that neo-liberalism’s attempt to derail the Left from its established development trajectory, to coerce it into accepting a neo-liberal trajectory instead, and to force it to adopt measures that would drive a wedge between itself and the basic classes on whose support the Left subsists, does not succeed. The Left Front government which has successfully waged many a battle will no doubt emerge triumphant from this one too.
THE LEFT FRONT AND WEST BENGAL DEVELOPMENTS
BY Prabhat Patnaik
PUBLISHED IN PEOPLES DEMOCRACY, 20TH MAY, 2001
THE Left Front's success in winning the elections to the West Bengal Assembly for the sixth consecutive time is remarkable by any standards. With the exception, and that too a very questionable one, of the PRI in Mexico, no political formation anywhere in the world has continuously held office through elections for as long as the Left Front would have done at the end of its current tenure. Commentators have naturally been working overtime to provide explanations for this unique phenomenon, but none of their explanations has come to grips with the basic fact that the Left Front's electoral achievement derives from its success in tackling the profound and protracted socio-economic crisis that had engulfed Bengal earlier and assumed critical proportions after the mid-sixties.
The crisis in Bengal of course was not specifically confined to Bengal. It was an integral part of the crisis of the Indian economy. But it appeared in Bengal in a particularly accentuated form, because every "depressor" of the Indian economy had a particularly severe impact upon Bengal.
PROTRACTED AGRARIAN CRISIS
Bengal, to start with, was the earliest "colonised" part of the country, and the impact of colonialism was particularly severe here. Not only was the systematic plunder and "drain" characteristic of colonialism visited upon this region in a more ruthless manner and for a more prolonged period than on any other region of the country, but even during the twentieth century itself, i.e, even after it had experienced a certain degree of industrialisation, it continued to face in the colonial era an agrarian crisis of unparalleled severity. The last half-century of colonial rule saw a decline in per capita food output in "British India" of over 25 percent; but the decline in "Greater Bengal" was far larger, as much as 38 percent between 1911 and 1946! The roots of the terrible famine of 1943 in which more than three million persons perished lay in this secular output decline.
The causes of this decline were shaped by colonialism. The "Permanent Settlement" which prevailed in Bengal prevented any investment in irrigation and other yield-raising measures by the colonial administration (unlike for instance the "Canal Colonies" in Punjab): since their claim on land revenue was fixed, any such investment would have given them a zero rate of return. But while there were no yield-increases, the peasantry had to bear the burden of exploitation by a whole range of intermediary parasites, with the zamindars at the top, and an ascending class of jotedars just below them. (They were yet another product of the colonial system and their ascendancy was drawn attention to in the famous memorandum of the Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha to the Floud Commission). And, notwithstanding a certain amount of modern industrialisation, the earlier and ongoing decline of traditional crafts kept up the pressure of population on land.
Independence and the following decades of Congress rule did little to overcome this acute and protracted agrarian crisis (which found poignant expression in literature, e.g., in Manik Bandyopdhyaya's stories). The abolition of zamindari only consummated the process of ascendancy of jotedars but did not alleviate the distress of the peasantry. Investment in irrigation was inadequate. (An erroneous belief inherited from the colonial times, and expressed for instance in the Report of the Royal Commission on Agriculture, namely that the problem with Bengal agriculture was not too little water but too much of it, might have contributed to this). West Bengal's agricultural growth, though much higher than under colonialism, continued to be lacklustre.
The mainsprings of even this growth, which consisted to a significant extent of an expansion in gross sown area, dried up in the sixties, as in the rest of the country. The underlying acute agrarian crisis was once again exposed. The mid-sixties saw an acute food crisis all over the country, but the Eastern region was particularly hard-hit. Bihar saw famine conditions. And West Bengal, also badly affected, saw the famous food movement. While the so-called "Green Revolution" that came as a sequel to this crisis raised yields quite significantly in certain parts of the country, Eastern India including West Bengal remained largely untouched by it. In its case the old agricultural crisis, marked by stagnant output, a peasantry under immense squeeze, and severe food shortage, continued.
STRUGGLES & REPRESSION
This agrarian crisis was compounded by an industrial crisis. Indeed the industrial economy of the region suffered both from colonialism and from the end of colonialism. It suffered from colonialism because of the pervasive and persistent deindustrialisation that it was subjected to. It suffered from the end of colonialism because the new industries that had developed, e.g., tea and jute, reflected the colonial pattern of international division of labour; they would have dwindled anyway but the end of colonialism hastened the process. What is more, the engineering industry that had come up just prior to independence and grown subsequently, received a big jolt from the industrial recession that set in after the mid-sixties, thanks to a curtailment in public investment (including, in particular railway investment). And the "freight-equalisation" scheme contributed to a shift of industry away from the region.
The mid-sixties therefore saw the region's economy engulfed in an acute crisis, which was a reproduction in an accentuated form of the crisis of the overall national economy. As the peoples' struggles against the crisis grew, they were met by repression which eventually culminated in the semi-fascist terror of the early seventies that claimed the lives of as many as 1200 comrades. This savage repression both pre-dated and anticipated the infamous Emergency imposed on the country as a whole in 1975. Here again West Bengal was experiencing in a particularly accentuated form the repression that the country as a whole was to experience later.
The Left Front government came into being against the backdrop of this situation of acute crisis, savage repression and a pervasive feeling of hopelessness. The achievement of the Left Front consists in transcending this conjuncture, in overcoming the protracted agrarian crisis and in giving West Bengal's economy an immensely forward thrust which would have appeared almost unbelievable at the time of its birth. It restored and protected democracy in political life. It preserved social cohesiveness and communal harmony in the face of severe challenges. And it brought about a sea-change in the countryside which not only ended the social dominance of the jotedars, but gave West Bengal the highest agricultural growth rate during the 1980s among all the states.
LEFT FRONT STRATEGY
There were at least four elements in the strategy that ended what has been called the "agrarian impasse in Bengal". The most significant was land reforms towards which the earlier UF governments had taken major steps. By registering unrecorded tenants, by ensuring that whoever cultivated the land had the right to reap the harvest, by enforcing a recording of rent payment, and above all by mobilising peasants on these issues, the government provided security of tenure, protection against rack-renting, and an incentive to the peasantry to undertake productive investment. Such information as is available from sample surveys in West Bengal suggests that in at least 80 percent of the cases the rent paid is within the legal limit, which is a proportion far in excess of what prevails elsewhere.
In addition to these measures, the government distributed ceiling-surplus land among the landless. The magnitude of such land distributed in West Bengal alone was larger than what has occurred in (united) Bihar, UP, Punjab and Orissa put together. In fact, West Bengal and Kerala are the only two states where according to the NSS landholding data the proportion of the landless (i.e., non-land-owning) among the total rural households has declined substantially between 1982 and 1992 (the latest year for which data are available). Even the degree of inequality (measured by the Gini coefficient) in the distribution of operational holdings has declined in these two states during this period (such declines however are also visible in Orissa, Assam and AP: see People’s Democracy May 6, 2001).
The second element was a substantial increase in investment in irrigation which in turn was part of a general increase in plan outlays. This made possible, in the context of the change in land relations, the utilisation of the third element, namely the availability of a technology package in the form of a three-crop cycle, the third crop being either potatoes or bodo rice. This three crop package had been introduced earlier in selected regions of the state (districts like Burdwan and Birbhum for example), but with the spread of irrigation it became possible to extend it elsewhere. And with the improvement in the status of the poorer sections of the peasantry, its adoption became pervasive, not confined only to relatively better-off peasants.
These measures were combined with the fourth element, namely the vitalisation of the panchayat system. There are important differences in the role and functioning of the panchayat system between Kerala (after the Peoples' Plan Campaign) and West Bengal, but the role which panchayats occupy in both these states is very different from elsewhere. In West Bengal the panchayats played a vital role in empowering the peasantry to utilise the opportunities made available to it for improving the productive forces in agriculture.
To be sure, the panchayats had an impact far larger than this, but our purpose here is not to go into the totality of their role, just as we do not intend to detail all the achievements of the Left Front government. Our aim is to provide analytical focus to one basic fact, namely the overcoming under the Left Front of the protracted crisis which had afflicted West Bengal's economy and which had got aggravated after the mid-sixties.
IMPROVEMENT IN LIVING CONDITIONS
These measures produced an upsurge in agricultural growth in West Bengal during the 1980s, which carried it to the very top of the growth-rate table among states. Of course during the 1990s there has been a slowing down of agricultural growth everywhere in the country, including West Bengal, as a result inter alia of the adoption of "structural adjustment" by the Union government. Even during the 1990s however the agricultural growth rate of West Bengal has been well above the national average.
The improvement in the living standard of the population as a consequence, among other things, of overcoming the agrarian crisis, is attested to by the National Sample Survey itself. West Bengal and Kerala are the only two states in the entire country which saw an increase in the per capita cereal consumption both in urban and rural areas between the seventies and the nineties. Likewise they are the only two states where the per capita calorie intake increased in the rural areas over this same period. Is it any surprise then that the people of the state have given their mandate to the Left Front on six consecutive occasions?
To be sure, the Left Front, while deriving satisfaction from the fact of having carried the state forward beyond the conjuncture of the 1960s, has to look ahead, to overcome the new set of problems that confront the state. The state still awaits a significant industrial revival. While the conditions for such a revival, by way of providing infrastructural support (e.g.power supply), have been created, the actual revival has still to occur.
What is more, imperialist onslaught is creating a whole new set of problems for the country which would affect, and are already affecting, West Bengal as well. Such problems include industrial closures and recession, and falling crop prices, owing to WTO-imposed trade liberalisation, and fiscal constraints owing to Fund-Bank-imposed budgetary and financial measures. Overcoming these problems poses a serious challenge. The Left Front has to cope with this challenge by mobilising the people, not only in the state but in the country as a whole.
PUBLISHED IN PEOPLES DEMOCRACY, 20TH MAY, 2001
THE Left Front's success in winning the elections to the West Bengal Assembly for the sixth consecutive time is remarkable by any standards. With the exception, and that too a very questionable one, of the PRI in Mexico, no political formation anywhere in the world has continuously held office through elections for as long as the Left Front would have done at the end of its current tenure. Commentators have naturally been working overtime to provide explanations for this unique phenomenon, but none of their explanations has come to grips with the basic fact that the Left Front's electoral achievement derives from its success in tackling the profound and protracted socio-economic crisis that had engulfed Bengal earlier and assumed critical proportions after the mid-sixties.
The crisis in Bengal of course was not specifically confined to Bengal. It was an integral part of the crisis of the Indian economy. But it appeared in Bengal in a particularly accentuated form, because every "depressor" of the Indian economy had a particularly severe impact upon Bengal.
PROTRACTED AGRARIAN CRISIS
Bengal, to start with, was the earliest "colonised" part of the country, and the impact of colonialism was particularly severe here. Not only was the systematic plunder and "drain" characteristic of colonialism visited upon this region in a more ruthless manner and for a more prolonged period than on any other region of the country, but even during the twentieth century itself, i.e, even after it had experienced a certain degree of industrialisation, it continued to face in the colonial era an agrarian crisis of unparalleled severity. The last half-century of colonial rule saw a decline in per capita food output in "British India" of over 25 percent; but the decline in "Greater Bengal" was far larger, as much as 38 percent between 1911 and 1946! The roots of the terrible famine of 1943 in which more than three million persons perished lay in this secular output decline.
The causes of this decline were shaped by colonialism. The "Permanent Settlement" which prevailed in Bengal prevented any investment in irrigation and other yield-raising measures by the colonial administration (unlike for instance the "Canal Colonies" in Punjab): since their claim on land revenue was fixed, any such investment would have given them a zero rate of return. But while there were no yield-increases, the peasantry had to bear the burden of exploitation by a whole range of intermediary parasites, with the zamindars at the top, and an ascending class of jotedars just below them. (They were yet another product of the colonial system and their ascendancy was drawn attention to in the famous memorandum of the Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha to the Floud Commission). And, notwithstanding a certain amount of modern industrialisation, the earlier and ongoing decline of traditional crafts kept up the pressure of population on land.
Independence and the following decades of Congress rule did little to overcome this acute and protracted agrarian crisis (which found poignant expression in literature, e.g., in Manik Bandyopdhyaya's stories). The abolition of zamindari only consummated the process of ascendancy of jotedars but did not alleviate the distress of the peasantry. Investment in irrigation was inadequate. (An erroneous belief inherited from the colonial times, and expressed for instance in the Report of the Royal Commission on Agriculture, namely that the problem with Bengal agriculture was not too little water but too much of it, might have contributed to this). West Bengal's agricultural growth, though much higher than under colonialism, continued to be lacklustre.
The mainsprings of even this growth, which consisted to a significant extent of an expansion in gross sown area, dried up in the sixties, as in the rest of the country. The underlying acute agrarian crisis was once again exposed. The mid-sixties saw an acute food crisis all over the country, but the Eastern region was particularly hard-hit. Bihar saw famine conditions. And West Bengal, also badly affected, saw the famous food movement. While the so-called "Green Revolution" that came as a sequel to this crisis raised yields quite significantly in certain parts of the country, Eastern India including West Bengal remained largely untouched by it. In its case the old agricultural crisis, marked by stagnant output, a peasantry under immense squeeze, and severe food shortage, continued.
STRUGGLES & REPRESSION
This agrarian crisis was compounded by an industrial crisis. Indeed the industrial economy of the region suffered both from colonialism and from the end of colonialism. It suffered from colonialism because of the pervasive and persistent deindustrialisation that it was subjected to. It suffered from the end of colonialism because the new industries that had developed, e.g., tea and jute, reflected the colonial pattern of international division of labour; they would have dwindled anyway but the end of colonialism hastened the process. What is more, the engineering industry that had come up just prior to independence and grown subsequently, received a big jolt from the industrial recession that set in after the mid-sixties, thanks to a curtailment in public investment (including, in particular railway investment). And the "freight-equalisation" scheme contributed to a shift of industry away from the region.
The mid-sixties therefore saw the region's economy engulfed in an acute crisis, which was a reproduction in an accentuated form of the crisis of the overall national economy. As the peoples' struggles against the crisis grew, they were met by repression which eventually culminated in the semi-fascist terror of the early seventies that claimed the lives of as many as 1200 comrades. This savage repression both pre-dated and anticipated the infamous Emergency imposed on the country as a whole in 1975. Here again West Bengal was experiencing in a particularly accentuated form the repression that the country as a whole was to experience later.
The Left Front government came into being against the backdrop of this situation of acute crisis, savage repression and a pervasive feeling of hopelessness. The achievement of the Left Front consists in transcending this conjuncture, in overcoming the protracted agrarian crisis and in giving West Bengal's economy an immensely forward thrust which would have appeared almost unbelievable at the time of its birth. It restored and protected democracy in political life. It preserved social cohesiveness and communal harmony in the face of severe challenges. And it brought about a sea-change in the countryside which not only ended the social dominance of the jotedars, but gave West Bengal the highest agricultural growth rate during the 1980s among all the states.
LEFT FRONT STRATEGY
There were at least four elements in the strategy that ended what has been called the "agrarian impasse in Bengal". The most significant was land reforms towards which the earlier UF governments had taken major steps. By registering unrecorded tenants, by ensuring that whoever cultivated the land had the right to reap the harvest, by enforcing a recording of rent payment, and above all by mobilising peasants on these issues, the government provided security of tenure, protection against rack-renting, and an incentive to the peasantry to undertake productive investment. Such information as is available from sample surveys in West Bengal suggests that in at least 80 percent of the cases the rent paid is within the legal limit, which is a proportion far in excess of what prevails elsewhere.
In addition to these measures, the government distributed ceiling-surplus land among the landless. The magnitude of such land distributed in West Bengal alone was larger than what has occurred in (united) Bihar, UP, Punjab and Orissa put together. In fact, West Bengal and Kerala are the only two states where according to the NSS landholding data the proportion of the landless (i.e., non-land-owning) among the total rural households has declined substantially between 1982 and 1992 (the latest year for which data are available). Even the degree of inequality (measured by the Gini coefficient) in the distribution of operational holdings has declined in these two states during this period (such declines however are also visible in Orissa, Assam and AP: see People’s Democracy May 6, 2001).
The second element was a substantial increase in investment in irrigation which in turn was part of a general increase in plan outlays. This made possible, in the context of the change in land relations, the utilisation of the third element, namely the availability of a technology package in the form of a three-crop cycle, the third crop being either potatoes or bodo rice. This three crop package had been introduced earlier in selected regions of the state (districts like Burdwan and Birbhum for example), but with the spread of irrigation it became possible to extend it elsewhere. And with the improvement in the status of the poorer sections of the peasantry, its adoption became pervasive, not confined only to relatively better-off peasants.
These measures were combined with the fourth element, namely the vitalisation of the panchayat system. There are important differences in the role and functioning of the panchayat system between Kerala (after the Peoples' Plan Campaign) and West Bengal, but the role which panchayats occupy in both these states is very different from elsewhere. In West Bengal the panchayats played a vital role in empowering the peasantry to utilise the opportunities made available to it for improving the productive forces in agriculture.
To be sure, the panchayats had an impact far larger than this, but our purpose here is not to go into the totality of their role, just as we do not intend to detail all the achievements of the Left Front government. Our aim is to provide analytical focus to one basic fact, namely the overcoming under the Left Front of the protracted crisis which had afflicted West Bengal's economy and which had got aggravated after the mid-sixties.
IMPROVEMENT IN LIVING CONDITIONS
These measures produced an upsurge in agricultural growth in West Bengal during the 1980s, which carried it to the very top of the growth-rate table among states. Of course during the 1990s there has been a slowing down of agricultural growth everywhere in the country, including West Bengal, as a result inter alia of the adoption of "structural adjustment" by the Union government. Even during the 1990s however the agricultural growth rate of West Bengal has been well above the national average.
The improvement in the living standard of the population as a consequence, among other things, of overcoming the agrarian crisis, is attested to by the National Sample Survey itself. West Bengal and Kerala are the only two states in the entire country which saw an increase in the per capita cereal consumption both in urban and rural areas between the seventies and the nineties. Likewise they are the only two states where the per capita calorie intake increased in the rural areas over this same period. Is it any surprise then that the people of the state have given their mandate to the Left Front on six consecutive occasions?
To be sure, the Left Front, while deriving satisfaction from the fact of having carried the state forward beyond the conjuncture of the 1960s, has to look ahead, to overcome the new set of problems that confront the state. The state still awaits a significant industrial revival. While the conditions for such a revival, by way of providing infrastructural support (e.g.power supply), have been created, the actual revival has still to occur.
What is more, imperialist onslaught is creating a whole new set of problems for the country which would affect, and are already affecting, West Bengal as well. Such problems include industrial closures and recession, and falling crop prices, owing to WTO-imposed trade liberalisation, and fiscal constraints owing to Fund-Bank-imposed budgetary and financial measures. Overcoming these problems poses a serious challenge. The Left Front has to cope with this challenge by mobilising the people, not only in the state but in the country as a whole.
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