Bengal's agrarian economy collapsing under TMC's mismanagement, alleges BJP

Kolkata, Nov 18 (PTI) West Bengal BJP president Samik Bhattacharya on Tuesday mounted a sweeping attack on the TMC government, alleging that the state's agrarian backbone was "crumbling under corruption, exploitation and political capture", and accusing the ruling party of "systematically reversing" its once formidable rural economy.

Addressing a press conference at the party's Salt Lake office, Bhattacharya said that Bardhaman, once hailed as the "rice bowl of India", had slipped to third place in national paddy production behind Uttar Pradesh and Telangana, a decline he pinned on "TMC's chronic mismanagement".

Citing official data, he claimed that West Bengal alone accounted for 3,177 of the 6,076 duplicate fertiliser cases registered across India. "This is the TMC's real 'Egiye Bangla' (Bengal ahead) model," he said.

'Egiye Bangla' is a slogan of the ruling Trinamool Congress.

Calling the state's fisheries growth rate "pathetic", the BJP leader said that while the national growth rate stood at 26 per cent, Bengal's was 15 per cent.

He alleged that "syndicate-backed TMC leaders" had illegally taken over ponds, forcing the state to buy grown fish from Andhra Pradesh using eggs originally sourced from Bengal.

"High-salinity water is deliberately pumped into agricultural fields to destroy farmland and turn them into fish ponds. This is the social reality TMC doesn't want people to see," he added.

Bhattacharya accused the state government of "weaponising electricity tariffs" against farmers, charging them commercial rates for shallow pumps even as other states offered subsidies.

He alleged the handloom industry had collapsed, rice mills were shutting down, and agricultural land was being diverted to politically connected real estate projects.

"Nearly 100 rice mills in Bardhaman have been closed in just two to three years. This is nothing but political land capture," the West Bengal BJP chief claimed.

On farmer's distress, he said snakebite deaths in tea and flower gardens had exposed the "shockingly poor" state of rural healthcare, with hospitals lacking anti-venom and life-saving drugs.

Bhattacharya alleged that touts dominated kisan mandis, denying farmers the benefits of Minimum Support Price.

"According to NABARD, Bengal's farmers earn barely one-third of what Punjab's farmers do. Even Operation Barga's 82 per cent land rights never translated into social upliftment because Bengal never saw cooperative farming," he said.

Operation Barga was a land reform programme launched in West Bengal in 1978 to register and protect the rights of sharecroppers (bargadars).

Bhattacharya also flagged misuse of pesticide, saying the chemicals used to kill the brown plant hopper pest were "damaging the paddy itself" in the absence of a monitoring system.

On potato procurement, he claimed that farmers were manipulated with false promises. "The chief minister spoke of buying potatoes at Rs 1,500 per quintal. But farmers were forced to distress-sell at Rs 5-6 per kilo after being blocked from selling it to Odisha, Jharkhand and Assam," he alleged, adding that "farmer suicides are being passed off as family disputes".

He criticised the reopening of eight tea gardens "without planning" before the Lok Sabha polls, calling it "a political gimmick without a tripartite agreement".

The state's 'Tea Tourism' policy, he claimed, was a "backdoor route for TMC-linked industrialists to grab garden land".

Raising environmental concerns, Bhattacharya alleged illegal construction on elephant corridors and black-marketing of "Golden Urea", whose price was fixed at Rs 366 by the Centre.

He said West Bengal refused to join the Centre's e-NAM (e-National Agriculture Market) platform meant to modernise kisan mandis, and exited the PM Fasal Bima Yojana despite participating in it from 2015 to 2019.

"The state's irrigated land stands at 59.21 per cent. Compare this to 87 per cent in Uttar Pradesh, 93 per cent in Haryana, and 81 per cent in Madhya Pradesh. This is Bengal's tragic reality," he said.

The senior BJP leader added that North Bengal's mango growers suffer due to lack of cold storage, tea workers face provident fund irregularities, and illegal sand mining is destroying riverbeds, altering river courses and deepening the corruption ecosystem.

"From agriculture to fisheries, from tea gardens to river systems, the TMC government has devastated Bengal's rural economy," he asserted. PTI PNT NN