In his novella The Metamorphosis, while talking about the sudden transformation of salesman Gregor Samsa into a giant insect, Franz Kafka wrote, "In a way, you’ve already chosen what you’ve become." This seems an apt expression of the metamorphosis of West Bengal from being one of the most admired states of India to being one of the most derided now. Indeed, it is a dark and depressing Kafkaesque world that West Bengal has become today, from which hope, ambition, and dreams have vanished. Seeking better futures, its youth are increasingly leaving the state for other places where they can fulfil their dreams. Every state institution has been crippled by the intrusion of politics. Once celebrated for attracting students nationwide, its universities and public institutions are now in an advanced state of decay, as students increasingly opt for lesser-known private alternatives. The ruling dispensation is still in a denial mode and can’t admit that Bengal today has slipped to the bottom of India’s imagination and finds no place in India’s growth story.

In December 2024, the West Bengal government initiated a survey to assess the number of students who studied in state boards until Class 12 and were moving out for higher studies. The results of the survey are unknown, but in 2021 EducationWorld, a private organisation specialising in educational surveys and rankings of academic institutions, found that 40%-70% of students from top schools in Kolkata wanted to migrate to other states to pursue higher education, despite the pandemic. This ratio might be higher now.

Over five lakh students graduate out of the three streams – science, arts and commerce – across at least three exam boards each year. Even a 40% migration would mean over a lakh youth leaving every year, and presumably, they are the brightest, having been able to secure admission in colleges and universities in other states. Very few of them are ever likely to return to a land that offers nothing but hopelessness in the absence of jobs and opportunities for growth. The ones who cannot afford to go out are forced to seek employment after their graduation with little prospect of growth. The hallmarks of a failed and dysfunctional state are visible across all aspects of social life as it struggles to reignite development. It has become a state that is slowly withering away in the true Marxist sense.

Jobs

Lack of opportunities can be assessed by patterns of outmigration from a state. Updated data on interstate migration are not available beyond the 2011 census, according to which nearly 5.8 lakh people migrated for work from West Bengal during 2001-2011, next only to Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Rajasthan. A 2023 study by four academics at the Karnataka Central University found that in the previous decade (1991-2001), West Bengal had received more migrants than it lost to the other states, but the situation reversed in 2011. Another 2022 study by academics from the Institute of Developmental Studies, Kolkata found that lack of regular employment opportunities and low-wage rate both in rural and urban West Bengal were driving them to other states where they lived in poor conditions, earning an average of only Rs 1.7 lakh per annum and sending two-thirds of its back home, yet a majority of them were unwilling to return to West Bengal.

While the chief minister is raising a hue and cry about Bengali-speaking migrants being targeted in other states, perhaps this is also a time to ask why they would migrate to other states if there are opportunities in Bengal. Bengal is becoming like Bihar, an economy sustained by migrants’ remittances, a state from which people leave never to return. 

As per the Annual Survey on Unincorporated Sector Enterprises (ASUSE) released in July 2024 by the National Statistical Office (NSO), West Bengal had lost 3 million jobs in unincorporated enterprises – or the informal sector – between 2015–16 and 2022–23, while Maharashtra had added 2.4 million workers in the same period. Newspaper reports and a detailed field investigation by Down To Earth highlighted that shrinking rural employment under MGNREGA are leading to migration from districts like Malda, Murshidabad, Nadia, Purulia, Bankura and North/South Dinajpur to southern states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana in search of livelihood. There daily wages range from Rs 700-800 versus only Rs 150-250 in West Bengal. The ASUSE report found that between October 2022 and September 2023, the informal sector added 11.74 million jobs nationally, while there was no evidence of any job gains in West Bengal, which today ranks among the worst-performing states in terms of informal employment.

These outmigration figures again include undocumented workers coming from Bangladesh and the Rohingya, fleeing a chaotic, dysfunctional, lawless state with no government worth the name, coming in search of better economic opportunities in a growing India. An ecosystem created, nurtured, and actively encouraged by the ruling dispensation in West Bengal for its own electoral interests ends with them moving out of the state of Bengal for work elsewhere. 

As regards formal sector jobs, in the absence of any publicly available, reliable data, the only proxy we can use is EPFO data, which does not provide state-specific granularity. But we know that in February 2025, there were net additions of 1.61 million employees across India, a 4% improvement over February 2024. Of these, 60% came from only a few states: Maharashtra, which contributed 21% to the net jobs, followed by Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Gujarat, Haryana, Delhi, Telangana, and Uttar Pradesh, each contributing 5% or more. West Bengal features nowhere among these.

Doles

When people lose jobs and hope, they can only depend on state largesse, of which there is no dearth: Lakshmir Bhandar, Taposili Bandhu, Rupashree, old-age pension, widow pension, Krishak Bandhu, Bina Mulya Samajik Suraksha Yojana, power subsidy, Durga Puja grants to local clubs, monthly grants to imams and muezzins in mosques, and also to priests in Hindu temples – schemes are countless. Just point out a section that is uncovered, and the government will create a dole scheme to buy their votes. The state is synonymous with the benevolent leader of the ruling party, whose dole umbrella is spread magnanimously over all voters, rich or poor. The three major schemes, Lakshmir Bhandar, Krishak Bandhu, and power subsidy alone cost the state over Rs 30,000 crore a year, and at a conservative estimate, all such schemes are draining the exchequer by Rs 40,000–Rs 45,000 crore a year. This is an enormous sum which, if invested in creating capacity and infrastructure in the state, would have completely transformed the state’s economic landscape, creating thousands of jobs. While the state largesse on doles continues to expand before every election, its regular employees, including the teachers, are not paid their dues. Their dearness allowance rate continues to be only 18%, while their counterparts in central and other state governments are paid 55%. Even a Supreme Court stricture has not helped, with the state pleading lack of resources, a sure way to make the employees demotivated and uncommitted.

Rome was one of the first states in history to introduce "cura annonae" – the grain dole to keep its restive population happy and later extended it to include bread, oil, pork, and wine, to be complemented by free public entertainment and spectacles like gladiatorial fights. Some historians attribute this as a major cause for the downfall of the Roman Empire. “The public distribution of corn at Rome was converted into a pernicious bribe; the use of it was extended or continued to the most idle and worthless of the populace...”, Edward Gibbon wrote in his monumental work on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, “The distinction of good and evil was confounded; the freedom of enquiry was discouraged; a blind and implicit obedience was required as the first virtue of a citizen.”

When that happens, voices of protest are muzzled, and people must learn to remain content in their chains and misery. Today’s West Bengal is not much different.

Govind Bhattacharjee is a former Director General at the Office of the Comptroller & Auditor General of India and is currently a Professor of Practice at the Arun Jaitley Institute of Public Financial Management.  Opinions expressed are personal.

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