Edited excerpts:
West Bengal has long suffered from negative narratives. Do you expect your budget to address this and create a platform for investment?
The budget is the vision statement. It will create optics. Now people will be looking for the fine print. In the short term, we are not going to see miracles of huge mega-projects coming in, but we are going to see a lot of normal business, which had not been undertaken for a long time, come back. And that vacuum offers a low-hanging fruit. This will create jobs. The other thing which we have banked on is revival of certain enterprises in Bengal. Reviving the Calcutta Stock Exchange is one of them. We will also list some of the state public sector undertakings.
Have you identified the low-hanging fruits?
We are focusing on completing the existing projects. For instance, we must move ahead at hurricane speed at the Dankuni-Uchalan link. Which was stopped. We’ve got to start on those sorts of things very fast. There is also a metro rail project. From our end, it’s not necessarily state-sponsored things which we are doing. The private sector projects also need to be completed fast with ease of doing business.
What is the best way to describe your maiden budget?
It is an expansionary one. I mean, given the scale of the deficit, or the debt, we had two clear options. One was, of course, to get bogged down by the early conservative fiscal prudence policy and concentrate totally on meeting the debt. That, at this particular point, would have been politically unacceptable for most people. Because they have just elected a government with soaring expectations.
Didn’t the revenue deficit squeeze the scope of an expansionary budget?
So, you had to find a way without being recklessly expansionary, and being moderately expansionary. Sometimes, that might sound semantic, but really what has come to our rescue to a very large extent is the fact that we, in West Bengal, never availed of the bulk of the Central schemes. It was a classic example of a state unwilling or unable to avail of benefits which were being offered by the Government of India. We are now exploring these schemes. That gave us a lot of breathing space.
You talked about the need for fiscal restructuring. One part of this exercise has to be revenue generation. What are the ways the state can grow revenue?
The revenue base of the state government is narrow. We all know that. The GST takes care of a lot of things. Another issue is compliance levels were low leading to massive leakage of government revenue. Take mining, for instance, which is a part of our revenue generation strategy. Anecdotally, what I’ve been told is that one out of every four trucks only paid the cess. So, there are these things which can be done. You can’t really base it completely only on alcohol and petrol.
You have also pushed the pedal on disinvestment. Have you identified any unit?
No, not really. We haven’t had time to. But there’s two types of disinvestment, as we said. There’s either you sell, or you can tell some people to buy things for scrap, which is a lot of things. All of the Howrah and Hooghly closed factories, which are unlikely to ever open again, getting some of that.
There has also been talks about selling land lying with the public sector undertakings… Will that serve as a land bank for new industries?
Land sales, we will try to do that in the short term. But I think urban renewal is the only way out. We have to get back and reuse those lands which have been out of commission for a long time. Things like Hind Motors, Jessop, Dunlop. I don’t know what has happened to Batanagar. Things like that. Those lands must be brought into industrial manufacturing use, not for residential purposes.
This process may take a long time, because of the legalities, doesn’t it?
We are looking at exploring whether legislation is necessary or executive orders will do.
