West Bengal to rationalise land laws for better business environment: Swapan Dasgupta 

Hoping to make West Bengal the country’s growth engine once again, West Bengal’s Finance Minister Swapan Dasgupta said the state government is looking to rationalise land laws and provide a better business environment.

He announced that the state is exploring options for deregulation and leveraging dead assets to handle public debt.

“Land is always a ticklish issue in West Bengal because of two reasons. One, it is in short supply due to sheer population pressure, and secondly, land holdings tend to be of handkerchief size,” said Dasgupta while speaking at Business Today’s India at 100 event.

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He noted that his predecessor regimes created land tenures which are so complex that one can’t sell land, and said, “we have to first get a large amount of legislation done to simplify land use.”

“I think what is necessary is to have other forms of incentives … We are experimenting with (land) pooling arrangements, which is … being successfully done in Gujarat and Haryana. But land is always going to be an issue in Bengal. I am not going to minimise its importance. So, anyone who thinks we are going to have all the land in the world, you got to be far more realistic. The important thing is to create an environment, which has been lost in Bengal by the impression that Bengal is just a very difficult place. Once you get that, things will move very fast,” he said.

He also noted that if businesses are purely looking at West Bengal in terms of incentives, there are states that give better incentives, but what they are doing is to showcase that the state has an ecosystem in place.

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“We have a tradition. We have a skilled workforce. We have a reasonably livable city. We have all these things. We are getting an infrastructure which is quite upgraded, and we need to just improve it. It is all there,” said Dasgupta.

The West Bengal Finance Minister explained that he has inherited “what might be called an obscene amount of public debt – 88 lakh crore Rupees.”

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“The first thing is how are we going to repay this? So, we have to think of imaginative solutions to this … maybe some off-budget approaches. We have to get much more deregulation … we have to get much more privatisation. We have to leverage our existing dead assets in a way to get the state budget in a healthy way. State finances and public finances are not healthy at present. If you can make it healthy, then you can create greater incentives,” he said.

When asked if Bengal can once again become a growth engine, he said: “We certainly hope so …. We certainly want to.”

“We are trying our best to at least inculcate that sense of tradition in the youth of Bengal. You people too are not anti-business. You have a rich tradition of business. I am trying to tell that. I think once that pride is inculcated, we will see some results. If, in the next four years, we can register the highest growth rate in India, I think that pride will return,” he told the gathering.

Further, while replying to a query about the role of GST rationalisation in implementing the state government’s agenda, Dasgupta said he has yet to attend his first GST Council meeting but remarked that simplification of GST is very important and noted that discretionary powers, which ideally should not exist, are vested in a lot of officers. Dasgupta said that this should end, and he urged all the states to focus on simplification and ending of all discretionary powers.

Meanwhile, Dasgupta, while replying to another query about specialised business clusters, spoke about data centres. “There is a problem with data centres… The amount of water it consumes … the amount of power it consumes, is something which should make people think.”

Watch the full conversation here