West Bengal- Daniel Thorner

West Bengal THE current infighting among the various Congress factions in West Bengal should not be allowed to divert attention from the reality of the state's nearly total industrial stagnation and swelling of the numbers of unemployed. Evidently, all attempts at inducing economic revival have failed. For the past two years, the state government has often flaunted data on fresh investment proposals. The exercise soon got to be known as 'the joke of the Rs 500 crores', since the 'investment proposals' aggregated to somewhere around that figure. But most of these proposals have been little more than enquiries. Between the enquiry and the placing of a formal application for a letter of intent, between a letter of intent and the actual issue of an industrial licence, between an industrial licence and actual investment