Bengal Polls: Has Kolkata become a big retirement home?

It’s early morning in Kolkata. Cars are jostling for space with autorickshaws, buses and pedestrians along the busy Rashbehari Avenue, named after a famous freedom fighter, while kettles at roadside tea stalls whistle as people huddle together exchanging local news, gossip and the latest from the Gulf War over their steaming cups of ‘chai’. All seems normal.

However, when one looks closely, a strange unstated fact cuts across the crowd of tea-lovers – most of those who throng the ‘addas’ or free-wheeling conversations, at tea-shops are middle-aged or old. The young seem to have deserted Kolkata, India’s former industrial capital.

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“The city has become one big retirement home. The young have all migrated to cities where there are jobs. India’s tech capital Bengaluru today has some 12 lakh Bengalis working there,” former Rajya Sabha MP and well-known intellectual Swapan Dasgupta told UNI over a cup of tea.

Dasgupta, who is BJP’s candidate in the upcoming state assembly elections from the prestigious Rashbehari constituency pitted against TMC warhorse Debasish Kumar, pointed out “Bengal was the number two state in economy rankings at the time of Independence. Today, it has really, really sunk.”

Statistics show West Bengal remains India’s sixth largest state in terms of economic size, with a projected Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP) of Rs. 20.31 lakh crore (USD 236.56 billion) for 2025-26.

However, this impressive figure hides the fact that West Bengal’s contribution to India’s GDP has fallen from 10.5 per cent in 1960-61 to just 5.6 per cent in 2024 as its industry declined and other states overtook it. The state’s per capita income has fallen even more starkly from 127.5 per cent of the national average in the 1960s to 83.7 per cent in 2024, and the state now ranks 22nd in terms of per-capita income among Indian states.

“A combination of factors, including replacement of traditional industries like jute, policy changes in the 1970s, militant labour movement, and failure to leverage post-1991 liberalisation, held back growth, whereas states such as Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra surged ahead,” said Prof Sabyasachi Basu Roy Chowdhury, former Vice Chancellor of Rabindra Bharati University.

Bengal, home to some of the country’s top-notch institutions including IIT Kharagpur, Indian Statistical Institute, Presidency University and Jadavpur University, is known to feed most of India’s tech giants based at Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Gurugram. Though the state’s tech city at Salt Lake has in recent years started taking off, most of the high-paying jobs are outside the city.

“The result is stark. Just see the number of flats which are vacant in New Town, or for that matter in South Kolkata,” points out Dasgupta. He flagged what he termed an “anti-manufacturing perception,” arguing that investor confidence has been eroded. Referring to the exit of the Tata Group’s Nano project from Singur after an agitation over land acquisition, the alumni of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, claimed that perception continues to shape business sentiment.

“If the Tatas could not manage here, how can small enterprises survive the political culture of extortion and protests?” he remarked, pointing to official figures which showed that some 6,688 companies relocated their registered offices outside West Bengal between 2011 and 2025. “Despite its locational advantages (a sea-board with historical trading links with East Asia and proximity to mineral riches), West Bengal attracted just 1 per cent of Foreign Direct Investment flowing into India in recent years,” Dasgupta claimed.

However, despite the industrial decline, with many factories within Kolkata itself turning into malls and residential high-rises, the state has witnessed a phenomenal 130 per cent state GDP growth over the last decade. Most of this growth has come from the services sector, which contributes 54.9 per cent of West Bengal’s GDP, and farming, which contributes 21.1 per cent.

“Anecdotal evidence shows that Salt Lake Sector V, which is Bengal’s tech hub, has attracted large numbers of IT and tech majors, who have shifted shop there after the Covid epidemic, attracted by low rentals and plentiful availability of tech workers,” said Basu Roy Chowdhury, a noted political scientist.

A new Bengal Silicon Valley Tech Hub in New Town (in Kolkata’s north eastern fringes), which is coming up as a 250-acre technology park, is expected to create another lakh of jobs in the coming years, over and above the approximately 1 lakh people who work in the sector currently. State government officials point out that West Bengal ranks third in internet usage in India, with some 70 million users.

“Much of this tech sector growth has happened because the state has supported it by coming up with favourable digitisation policies,” said Basu Roy Chowdhury, adding that the sector had also spawned vast logistics parks, a gig economy and a food economy.

Adding a touch of glamour and change in lifestyle to this silent tech revolution has been the changing character of streets like Raja Basanta Roy Road, Hindustan Park, Lake Road and Dover Road.

Cafes and eateries boasting free wi-fi have sprung up as a new breed of food-prenuers have capitalised on the tech boom, with their savings and enterprise.

Bengal’s pivotal position, its dense network of roads, the third largest in the country, and geographic location have also meant that the state continues to be one of India’s major trading hubs. As of 2024, 22.9 per cent of the state GDP came from trading, hotels and communications, with trading accounting for the lion’s share.

“Afterall it was trade which attracted the English East India Company, the French and the Dutch to set up warehouses and trading posts in Bengal … that tradition continues even today as firms here trade with Southeast Asia, China, Gulf countries, Europe and the US,” pointed out Shovan Sircar, 66,a tea trader who exports Darjeeling, Assam and blended teas over a wide arc from Japan to Germany.