7/21/2019 30 Days After Victory, Mamata Banerjee’s Administration Discovers a 35-Yr Worth to-do List - The Economic Times

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One month after M amata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress alliance swept to victory in Bengal, people there can heave a sigh of relief. Before

the results came out, the victory was widely anticipated. With that, was the widespread fear of reprisal killings across the state. In Bengal, people

shook their heads worriedly and feared that bands of Trinamool supporters would put their tormentors of over three decades to the sword, with the

 police looking on. Something like that would have dragged Bengal back to the dark days of the 1970s, a time of midnight knocks on the door and

hundreds of people disappearing without trace.

 Nothing of the sort has happ ened. Credit for that goes squarely to Banerjee and her fledgling administration. Even before results were announced,

Banerjee asked her boisterous support ers to hold their horses and be calm - not once or twice, but every time she spoke. She also insisted that

central paramilitaries remain in the st ate after elections were over, which signalled that she was serious about keeping the p eace. Now the expected

overhang of violence is gone and Banerjee is like a whirlwind, trying to breathe life into Bengal's economy, moribund for nearly 30 years.

She met businessmen recently and told them she could be extra cautious, do a very small number of things and get each one right; but she preferred

to do many, many things, stumble a few times, but get results from all the rest. "The intent is very important, the idea of getting things done is a

novelty in Bengal," Trinamool vice president Derek O'Brien told me. He's right: intent matters, it's important to be seen as a p urposeful

administration. But, the number of things that the new administration must do is mind-boggling.

For starters, healthcare and education are a shambles in Bengal. Recent research by Jyotsna Jalan of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences on

 primary education found that kids in Class IV couldn't answer simple things they should have been taught in Classes I, II and III. Children were

surveyed in six districts across the state and tested in two subjects: mathematics and Bengali. In maths, the average score was less than 28 out of 

100; in Bengali, it was less than 22 out of 100. But don't blame the kids.

The Left with its crony-everything system were perfectly fine with schoolteachers who attended party meetings, but did not teach. Government

doctors, as a villager in Bankura told me recently, organised Left rallies in their spare time and treated patients for a fee at home. Under the Left,

nobody needed to work at the work hospitals. How will M amata deal with these problems? She can't sack all teachers and doctors in one fell

swoop and conjure up an entirely new crop from the blue.

She's encouraging those close to retirement to go into the sunset, she's promised changes at the top in higher education and healthcare, and

everybody's hop ing that the new administration will manage to wring performance and accountability out of the existing bunch of people. When

Mamata announced her deal with the Gorkha Janmukti Council (GJM), now the leader of the 30-year long Gorkhaland movement, which wants

 parts of nort h Bengal to break away, she took the breath away from many detractors. After all, the Left had s truggled to control the movement,

unsuccessfully, for decades. For the last five years or so,Darjeeling and its surroundings had been ruined by violence.

Today, the call for independence is off the t able. The area will get the status of an autonomous hill council. If M amata's looking for a blueprint for 

the Darjeeling autonomous area, she doesn't have to look very far: the Gorkha agreement should be modelled along the lines of the Bodo TerritorialCouncil of Assam. This has administrative, financial, legislative and executive powers in four dist ricts of the st ate. Indeed, India's north-east, with

as many as 10 autonomous councils, can be the blueprint for the new-improved Darjeeling council.

Political part ies in India are gett ing to know about the high cost of land. The Left's brut al, hamhanded landgrab in Singur and Nandigram provided

the ammunition that Mamata needed to ratchet her campaign into high gear. A committee in her new administration has outlined what Bengal's new

land acquisition policy will be: for private projects, project developers will have to negotiate for and buy all the land. This makes eminent sense in

southern, central and parts of north Bengal, where pop ulations are dense, land fertile or ecologically sensit ive. In the western - and most backward -

 part of the state, much of the land is barren, growing one crop a year when it rains. The state should nudge businesses like manufacturing, which

need large plots, towards Birbhum, Bankura, Purulia and west M idnapore.

The CPI-M's union CITU is feared in Bengal for many reasons. Yet M amata might just have to sidestep, not attack it. The Left, steeped in

European textbooks, defined workers as factory and industrial employees. As Bengal became a rust belt, t he CITU's core competence faded. Its

 

The Economic Times

Tue, Jun 21, 2011 | Updated 06.14PM IST

21 Jun, 2011, 05.10AM IST, Abheek Barman,

30 days after victory, Mamata Banerjee’s administration discovers a

35-yr worth to-do list

7/21/2019 30 Days After Victory, Mamata Banerjee’s Administration Discovers a 35-Yr Worth to-do List - The Economic Times

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/30-days-after-victory-mamata-banerjees-administration-discovers-a-35-yr 2/2

leadership is geriatric and in the last days of the Left, concentrated on evicting workers from factories, so that p roperty developers could build malls

there. Mamata needs to focus on unorganised workers - small shopkeepers and betelnut sellers, bus drivers, housemaids and landless farmers.

Almost all are harassed every day by a corrupt system. A crackdown on petty corruption and harassment will win her many followers. It's a long

list. But Banerjee still has 59 months to check things off one by one.

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