Bengal: Babus or Entrepreneurs

Many say that Bengal is a land of babus, middle class people who like me would prefer to work for others. The true Bengali would protest this is but a myth, while most outsiders would say this is more than the truth.

The reality is that only a small percentage of Bengalis actually do babu-giri. Lets go back in time and see what used to be and then compare it with what is and could be.

During the Pala and Sena period, Sonargaon was one of the many centre’s of Bengal’s flourishing trade, industry and high finance which had mercantile links with the Far East and of course with ports of the sub-continent.

There is enough evidence of entrepreneurship and trade prior to that with ports at Tamluk and in the Sunderbans.

During the Mughal period, trade did pass to a large extent into the hands of immigrant Marwari traders who followed Raja Man Singh. The Raja of Jaipur successfully invaded Bengal on behalf of Emperor Akbar, defeating Raja Pratapaditya, Isha Khan et all. However traditional Bengali businessmen from the Basak, Seth, Saha etc. communities remained strongly entrenched. The best bit was that Bengal being a cosmopolitan trading hub integrated the immigrants quickly and created a single entreprenuerial/trading class.

Many not so well off or dispossessed landlords (who had lost land due to wars/the Padma or Ganges changing its course/political intrigue at court/debt) joined business in the 17th and 18th century as `agents' of the East India company and traded in salt, textiles and indigo. The Sens of Berhampore were an example of this. Unfortunately most of these new businessmen lapsed into being landed gentry when the permanent settlement of Bengal came into being, by buying zamindaris.

During the 19th and early 20th century Renaissance period, Bengali bhadralok entrepreneurs set up steamship companies, sugar mills, tea gardens, chemical companies (Bengal Chemicals, Calcutta Chemicals etc.). At least one of them, Sir R N Mukherjee, became a steel and manufacturing tycoon whose wealth rivaled that of the Tatas and Birlas.

Post partition, many of the new metal forges, coach body building units etc. were set up by refugee gentlemen who had some money and an urge to get back their socio-economic status. The 1960s and 1970s saw CPM supported labour militancy forcing many mills and factories to down shutters. While gun-fights between Naxal, CPM, Congress cadres created terror in the minds not only of ordinary people but also potential investors.

A disastrous policy passed by Mrs Indira Gandhi’s cabinet in the 1970s, under the influence of an early `Bombay Club' of business lobyists, which equated the price of steel and coal all over India, spelled doom for East India’s metal based industries. Many factories in Howrah and Hooghly shut down in the wake of this policy. As did Rohtasnagar in Bihar, turning into a ghost town.

From 1971 onwards, the then Chief Minister Siddharth Shankar Ray’s battle against Naxalites degenerated into indiscriminate sweeps against educated boys studying in Bengal’s best colleges and engineering schools, which often ended in extra-judicial mass killings. Those who were saved from this turbulence were often spirited out of Bengal for a safer life outside.

In the late 1970s, when peace returned. Things could have been different. A flowering of entrepreneurship which many states witnessed during that period by-passed Bengal. There were many reasons for it. Not the least, that a generation of bright minds had been crushed in the name of fighting ultras.

But the real fault lies with the leaders of that time. They did not take any steps to build entrepreneurship. Business grows only with state patronage. It does not grow in a vacuum.

Where Bengal went wrong was in not using the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation to develop a cadre of first generation educated entrepreneurs during the 1970s through 2010, when most other states did exactly that. WBIDC under Jyoti babu and Buddha babu lent only to traditional business houses and hardly to new entrepreneurs. The industrial development corporations of all other states did just the opposite and took care to hold the hands of young businessmen they set up, to ensure they went beyond incubation.

On the plus side, Bengal, espcially Calcutta or Kolkata as it is now called, remains a cosmopolitan place. It does not discriminate between an entrepreneur who speaks Bengali at home from someone whose mother tounge is Sindhi, Gujrati, Marwari, Urdu, Oriya, Tamil or English or French. Such a medley of cultures always retains the potential to throw up entrepreneurial spirits and choices.

Where Bengal can go right is by building this cadre now. Take people who have ideas, the education and possibly experience to set up enterprises and help them flower by giving them loans, holding their hands, by fast tracking their projects across government departments and by giving them the infrastructure and environment they need. While doing so, take care to retain the cosmopolitan flavour of Calcutta.

Let a thousand entrepreneurial flowers bloom, instead of a single giant industrial house. It will create more jobs and spread more backward and forward linkages than a single car factory could.