West Bengal is aiming to provide a hospitable environment to accommodate workers from Bihar, Jharkhand, Assam and the Northeast, state’s Finance Minister Swapan Dasgupta said on Friday.
Speaking at a conference organised by the Indian Chamber of Commerce (ICC), Dasgupta pitched the state as a “skills base” for the services and hospitality sectors in eastern India, two sectors he described as having a “great multiplier effect on employment”.
What the effort needed above all, he added, was cohesion and “growth of the East.”
Dasgupta also made a pitch for Bengal’s economic revival at an Indian Chamber of Commerce conference this week, acknowledging that the state had “fallen off” India’s development map for half a century and arguing that its comeback must be tied to the wider rise of eastern India.
“For 50 years, Bengal somehow disappeared from the development and economic map of India,” he said, describing the effort to bring it back as an uphill task against a “formidable” reputation.
He traced the economic decline to a flight of capital in the 1960s amid political turbulence, followed by years of left-wing unrest and successive governments that, according to him, prioritised welfare spending over development. The results of this strategy were not very encouraging for Bengal and the state slipped from being a gross domestic product (GDP) leader to a laggard, Dasgupta added.
Central to his argument was the case for treating eastern India as a single economic bloc rather than a set of competing states. “In a global environment, where the demand for tea has been falling quite alarmingly in our view, I think it’s time we need a more coordinated approach, not merely seeing Bengal in isolation, not merely seeing Assam in isolation, but seeing also in a composite way the whole of eastern India,” he added.
The minister said that education, once a strength for Bengal, had “slipped”, but that the rise of the knowledge economy offered a chance for the state to become a “corporate headquarters” again rather than a “branch office”. He pointed to ambitious plans for a knowledge or “edu-city” and for a health ecosystem to build up medical tourism, noting that patients from eastern India currently travel to southern states for treatment.
He linked Bengal’s prospects to the Centre’s focus on the growth of the East and to what he called a “new normal” of stronger national growth, citing the GDP figures of 7.8 per cent for the first quarter of 2026-27 (Q1FY27).
Uttar Pradesh, once dismissed alongside Bihar, was now “pressing the accelerator”, he said, and he urged the same purposefulness across Bihar, Odisha and, above all, Bengal, which he called the biggest laggard of the lot.
