Twenty-one years after Rajiv Gandhi declared Calcutta “a dying city”, the first capital of the British Empire has risen, Phoenix-like, to mock at his words. The gleaming metropolis has certainly helped Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee become the favoured choice of Kolkata’s traditionally anti-Left elite and middle class. But it also invokes—much like the NDA’s India Shining slogan—a great deal of bitterness among erstwhile industrial workers and displaced farmers who live in the city’s underbelly and outskirts. For anyone visiting Kolkata even after a gap of a couple of years, the transformation is startling. The second Hooghly bridge, redolent with post-modern elegance, dwarfs the Howrah Bridge that was once the city’s landmark. Giant flyovers, glitzy malls, half a dozen multiplexes and Gurgaon-style condominiums have sprung up. The government, with the help of corporates, plans to revive the city’s waterfront and—in the name of Heritage Conservation—refurbish monuments and statues that belong to the city’s once-reviled imperial past. But it is not just about infrastructure projects and beautification schemes, it is about a change of attitude. Gone is that air of genteel decay that spawned reams of poetry, and—to those who abandoned the city for greener pastures—nostalgia. The pace is still more leisurely than in Mumbai or Delhi, but those long siestas behind shuttered green windows are being given up by men and women rushing to call centres, or other places of pleasure and work. All the big IT majors—IBM, TCS, Wipro, AIG, ITC Infotech, Reliance and Satyam among others—have come to Kolkata, feeding the Left Front government’s hopes of emerging as the country’s biggest IT centre. A permanent trade fair complex, a Salt Lake Electronics Complex, Kolkata Leather Complex, a Foundry Park and a Toy Park are other projects are on the anvil. “The Left Front’s new approach in the last five years has touched the imagination of the youth and urban middle class—there is a sense of confidence in urban areas that something is happening,” says Industries minister Nirupam Sen. Although the West Bengal government decided on its new growth path after finalising the Industrial Policy Document of 1994, the perception about the state remained negative for a long time. “But now we have succeeded on two fronts. Private investors have earned our confidence and are investing in the state in a big way. And second, there has been an attitudinal change in our own working class, our own people that under the present circumstances, we cannot achieve growth without private capital,” adds Sen. The first may be true. But as we cross the Howrah bridge and enter what was once the traditional industrial heartland of the state, the second “success” seems like a chimera. The jute and textile industries that once lined the two banks of Hooghly— spanning Hooghly, Howrah and 24 Parganas districts—are mostly shut or working with a depleted workforce with more depleted wages. Here in Salkia, small and large factories that produced steel and metal are in a state of forlorn neglect, the dingy lanes and bylanes reek of Dickensian despair. And even if the CITU has grudgingly fallen in line with the LF government’s reform-friendly policy, unaffiliated trade union leaders and workers are seething with rage. Purnendu Basu, a TU leader who was deeply involved with the famous Kanoria Jute Mill agitation in the mid-1990s, insists that IT can never replace—either in terms of job or growth—the traditional industries of jute, tea, engineering and textiles. “We are not against the IT sector but it offers very few jobs. Labour is capital in a poor country, but instead of looking at the industrial problem from labour’s viewpoint, the LF government has opted for the neo-liberal path which puts profit over people.” It is not as though jute mills have lost their relevance. Private owners such as Arun Bajoria keep buying one mill after another—but workers are hired at Rs 50 or less per day against the earlier Rs 250. TU activist Dola Sen admits that given the bleak employment scenario, the workers have little choice. “We went to Ambika Jute Mills some time ago and told the workers not to accept the abysmal Rs 25 per day wage. They turned around and said—will you give us Rs 30?” The CPI(M) admits that revival of old industries on the same conditions (i.e. the erstwhile wages) is near impossible. According to CITU Hooghly district secretary Sunil Sarkar, the decline of traditional industries has been offset by the mushrooming of new factories. Biscuit factories, rolling mills, potato chip manufacturers (including MNC Pepsico), Mother Dairy etc. have come up. And though many of the new industries do not follow labour laws (in fact trade unions are banned in most), they do provide jobs. More important, say CPI(M) ministers, the rise of the “new economy” has given scope for growth in the service sector—restaurants and hotels have come up on the new highways, shops, security guards, and servants are needed to service the new townships. Those claims appear to anger the old working class as well as the newly displaced peasantry—those who sold their land for new townships, roads and projects—even more. “Where are the jobs?” asks Nimai Charan Ray, who lives in Salkia and once worked in the big metal firms that dotted his hometown. Every morning, huge numbers of men and women—who no longer have a secure job or land to till—arrive at Howrah or Sealdah or Ultadanga stations seeking some work for the day. “They wait for piecemeal work at construction sites. Some days they are lucky, most days they are not,” says Dola Sen. A group of young men in Bally, like everyone else we meet in village or town, has only two things to say about the elections that are on: the Election Commission has done an excellent job; and that a “poribortoner hawa” (a mood for change) is in the air. But hasn’t Buddhadeb changed the image of Kolkata? “Only the rich can live in the townships he has built; only they can use those swimming pools,” says Indranil Adhikari bitterly. The support of the urban middle class may give room for cheer, but the urban poor’s palpable disenchantment is a much bigger cause for worry for the Left, even party insiders are beginning to admit. manini.chatterjee@expressindia.com
