Bengal has never been a hub for large manufacturing, claims TMC leader Mahua Moitra: How true is her statement

All India Trinamool Congress (AITC or TMC) Lok Sabha MP Mahua Moitra has once again drawn strong ire due to her misleading comments over the acute shortage of industries in West Bengal during an interview with Sreenivasan Jain for Newslaundry, which was published on 14th April (Tuesday). The state is undergoing assembly elections with voting scheduled to occur on 23rd and 29th April. “How many new investments and new projects have taken off in the past five or 15 years? I’m not talking of proposals or MoUs (Memorandum of Understandings) but actual implementations,” Jain asked, to which she replied, “Now remember one thing that Bengal has never been a hub for large manufacturing and cannot be. It is a partition state it is still an agrarian economy with very small land holdings.” “It is not possible for us to give a thousand acres or 2,000 acres or you know very large tracks of land which is possible in many other states where they’re not that dependent on agriculture. Bengal is a very fertile land. People are still dependent on agriculture. So, this is something that stands in the way of very large manufacturing investments,” Mahua added. However, the falsehoods were promptly dismantled not just by the Bharatiya Janata Party but also by the netizens, who emphasised that the region was historically a manufacturing giant, and the current industrial landscape is a direct outcome of the policies of the ruling party. BJP and netizens remind Moitra of the actual cause for the decline of industries in Bengal BJP retorted that the “truth cannot be changed for convenience” and pointed out how the state was the nation’s production powerhouse, which housed Hindustan Motors, the makers of the iconic Ambassador cars, Bengal Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals Limited (BCPL), India’s first pharmaceutical business, engineering firm Burn & Company and the major tire manufacturer, Dunlop, alongside multiple others industries and a vast network of jute mills and foundries. This large-scale industrial dominance contributed 20% of the country’s production. BJP remarked that the state is not devoid of potential or industry but rather dearth of a willing leadership under the “dictatorial TMC government.” It charged that “corruption, strikes, violence, lack of Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) and a broken business climate under Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee pushed 6,688 companies out of Bengal between 2011 and 2025. First, they destroyed the industrial backbone. Now, they deny it ever existed. They lie. They deflect. They deny. But Bengal remembers. And Bengal will respond.”