THE WEST Bengal government is focusing on human capital and the state is the pivot, Amit Mitra, principal adviser to the Chief Minister and the finance department, said on Friday.
Addressing the Rising Asia-BBC&I Summit, Mitra said Kolkata is considered the “number one science city” in the country. Kolkata has an environment and a strong educational foundation that produces a large number of students, he said.
“In 2020, we had 33,000 engineering seats. We added 11,000 seats in the past four years and today, the number of state government engineering colleges here is nine.”
Bengal is rising because we are focusing on human capital, he pointed out. “The number of industrial training institutes is 298 and 47,280 students study here. There are 184 polytechnics, 38,000 intakes, and over two lakh study in vocational training institutes in Bengal,” said Mitra.
He said that West Bengal has 62 medical and health science colleges, 35 medical colleges and 4,553 MBBS seats in Government institutions and 5,600 in private institutions. Today 10,000 medical seats in West Bengal are part of the human capital.
Mitra added, “On one hand, we have government schemes such as Laxmi Bhandar and Kanyashree, parallelly there has been investment in capital expenditure. Bengal is walking on its own two feet, investing in human capital, putting cash in the hands of people to create excess demand…”
All major IT companies are here in Bengal now. Bengal is the cement hub of India, all nine cement companies are in Bengal. Railways manufacturing hub , three major giants in railway manufacturing all in Bengal. Any Metro… equipment is all being manufactured here. Leather hub is here.”
Mitra pointed out that Bengal is now looking into shale gas, “Now we are looking into shale gas, we have it below the coal belt… Policies are happening. We are looking at a natural gas pipeline…”
According to Mitra, there is a “policy difference” between the Centre and West Bengal. “The national policy consisted of cutting corporate taxes for investments. Did it happen? No. Wrong policy, massive inequality. But Bengal is looking at human capital, the bottom-up policy while the Centre is following the top-down policy, leading to massive unemployment.”
“In Bengal, we have 905 new primary schools, 6,069 mupper primary schools, 747 secondary schools, 2,096 high schools, 52 government colleges, 543 private colleges, 38 polytechnics,19 state-aided universities and 11 new private universities,” said Mitra.