“I love the city, but am ashamed of its condition”

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

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Kolkata, a former industrial powerhouse, is struggling to keep pace in India’s modernizing economy. According to The Economist:

[N]o one disputes that West Bengal has suffered deindustrialisation on a par with the likes of Detroit. According to the central bank, the state accounted for a quarter of India’s industrial capital stock in 1950. By 1960 it contributed 13% of manufacturing output and by 2000 just 7%.
 
Other measures are just as dire. Bank lending is below the national average. Calcutta’s population fell slightly over the past decade, no mean achievement in a rapidly urbanising country. Only one big non-state firm is based there, after an exodus that began in the 1960s. Most pitifully of all, West Bengal has received less than 2% of the foreign direct investment that poured into India over the past decade.