Opinion Business will not be as usual

She knows quite well that every state election since the middle of the last decade has gone in favour of parties that seemed most likely to deliver on governance and development. She is unlikely to misread the script,one on which she herself has invested so much.

Her problem,however,will be what to deliver for the state. West Bengal is not a clean slate,unlike Bihar where little had happened in the industrial sector,investment in education and agricultural reforms over the past 60 years. West Bengal has seen them all to some degree — and also the slide back from there.

In West Bengal,people have developed as an industrial labour force but are caught in an agrarian economy. This is the aspiration challenge that the new government has to address. The CPM drilled into the people the idea that surviving on agriculture was fine and built a modicum of a safety net around them. For Mamata to succeed,she will have to offer them something different.

The biggest demand will come in favour of rapid industrial regeneration. But since Mamata has also boxed herself as an uncompromising land crusader,any plan to satisfy that demand runs the risk of playing into the hands of the Left. This is the reason her party manifesto has announced a revival plan for small and micro-enterprises,which she hopes will take some edge off the demand for large industries.

One thing is certain. Within days of entering the Writers’ Building,Mamata Banerjee will call the industrial leaders of the state for a meeting. Even on Friday,as the election results were being announced,prospective finance minister Amit Mitra’s erstwhile domain,FICCI,announced that it would hold its next executive committee meeting in Kolkata in July to engage with the state on an industrial blueprint.

This is linked to Mamata’s next big challenge. West Bengal,in general,and Kolkata,in particular,among the big metros has the largest proportion of the skilled unemployed. The latest data on employment trends from the Central Statistical Organisation shows that West Bengal has one of the highest rates of self-employment in the country. So beyond the immediate issue of the debt trap,productive employment will be a key determinant for Mamata to show that her “poribortan” is working.

The Left Front’s solution to the issue created a potential minefield in the state. Since they could not arrest the de-industrialisation in the state,the CPM-led government co-opted most services-sector employees,especially teachers and health-sector employees,into government departments. This is one of the reasons for the debt trap,and Mamata will have to cut back on this huge workforce to bring a level of sanity into the state budget.

This means she has to aggressively woo large industries,trim the flab of government departments and also ensure that the state generates adequate capital to encourage banks to finance small and micro-enterprises.

But away from an industrial blueprint that obviously cannot be too different from what other states are pursuing,her chief headache will be the agrarian sector. So far,the Party’s writ has run supreme in the agrarian landscape. The local Party offices determined everything from the crop cycle to who will cultivate a piece of land to ownership of houses. This command-control system is so ingrained in rural areas that the Trinamool victory will create a severe crisis of governance.

The credit for Bengal’s agrarian transformation has to go to this network,whose scale of penetration is impossible to visualise unless one has stayed in rural Bengal.

Mamata Banerjee’s party is not as big nor as systemically organised as the CPM or other Left parties to supplant their role entirely. She will have to get large swathes to abdicate such control,but a dip in agricultural production is likely this financial year as this system gets abandoned. This is the unstated but most formidable challenge in the state that she will have to face up to.

In her favour,of course,are the young voters who identify with her far more than with the Left,and that is a huge positive. They believe in her simply because they want a chance to get on with life in a way that the Left Front government seemed unable to provide.

It is also interesting that the Trinamool manifesto is not so much about new things as it is about getting the institutions in the state to perform. To that extent,her challenge will be governance.

The writer is Executive Editor (News),‘The Financial Express’