Kolkata, March 24 – The BJP on Tuesday dismissed the claims made by the Trinamool Congress regarding the state of affairs of companies registered and active in West Bengal.
Citing a figure presented by the Union Ministry of Corporate Affairs to the Rajya Sabha on the same day, Amit Malviya, the head of the BJP's Information Technology Cell and the party's central observer for West Bengal, dismissed the claims made earlier by the Trinamool Congress leadership that 254,000 companies were registered in the state, which was evidence of industrial revival.
Countering this statement from the ruling party, Malviya claimed that according to the figures presented by the Union Ministry of Corporate Affairs to the Rajya Sabha, only 154,575 companies were active in West Bengal, while 78,615 companies were deregistered (meaning inactive or defunct), and 1,016 additional companies were in liquidation.
According to him, this meant that out of the 254,000 companies that were once registered in West Bengal, only 61% are actually surviving now.
"The TMC counts graves as growth. And out of those 154,575 'active' companies, only 1,782 reported a profit of over Rs 10 crore in the financial year 2024-25. This is the real industrial Bengal that Mamata Banerjee built," Malviya alleged.
For some time, the BJP had been vocal about the alleged capital flight from West Bengal. Before becoming the state president of the BJP in West Bengal, Samik Bhattacharya, as a Rajya Sabha member, had highlighted statistics from the Union Ministry of Corporate Affairs showing that a total of 2,227 companies have shifted their base from West Bengal to other states during the last five years from 2019 to 2024, of which 39 were listed with the Mumbai Stock Exchange.
The state unit of the BJP, quoting the claims from the Union Ministry of Corporate Affairs, claimed that the reasons for shifting included factors such as flexibility in operations, smooth management, the cost of company administration, and better infrastructure facilities, among others.