From left: Mamata Banerjee, Suvendu Adhikari
Credit: PTI photo
Kolkata: The Budget 2026-27 has nothing to offer for West Bengal, Chief Minister and the ruling Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee said on Sunday, even as the Bharatiya Janata Party’s heavyweight, Suvendu Adhikari, claimed that Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had rekindled hope in the state for a new wave of industrialisation.
“They have not given a single paisa for West Bengal. This is a Humpty Dumpty budget,” Mamata told journalists in Kolkata before leaving for New Delhi.
“This budget is directionless, visionless, actionless and anti-people. It is also anti-women, anti-farmer, anti-education and against the interests of the SCs, STs and the OBCs,” she alleged.
Her principal chief advisor, Amit Mitra, alleged that the BJP-led government had proposed to bring down allocation for fertiliser subsidy from 4.04% of total expenditure in 2015-16 to 3.19% for 2026-27. Mitra, a former finance minister of the state, also pointed out that the allocations for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes and minorities had declined from 0.21% of the total budget in 2015-16 to 0.19% for the coming financial year.
The finance minister of the central government delivered the budget speech for 85 minutes but did not mention West Bengal even once, Mamata’s heir apparent and the TMC general secretary, Abhishek Banerjee, said. With the state assembly elections just a few weeks away, the BJP, however, countered the TMC’s allegations about the budget, citing Nirmala Sitharaman’s proposal for the East Coast Industrial Corridor with a well-connected node at Durgapur in West Bengal and a new Dedicated Freight Corridor, connecting Dankuni in West Bengal with Surat in Gujarat.
To counter the TMC’s claim about the short shrift for West Bengal, the BJP leaders in the state also cited the proposal in the Union Budget for the construction of a high-speed rail corridor from Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh to Siliguri in North Bengal.
“Today’s Union Budget has kindled a ray of hope in the minds of the people of West Bengal. To usher in a wave of industrialisation, large-scale investments have been planned for infrastructure development,” Adhikari, the frontrunner for the BJP’s chief ministerial face in West Bengal, said, adding that the proposed East Coast Industrial Corridor, stretching from Tamil Nadu to Durgapur in West Bengal, would seamlessly connect ports, national highways, railways, and industrial clusters. “A unique industrial corridor will thus take shape, creating a favourable environment for setting up industries in West Bengal,” the Leader of the Opposition in the state assembly said.
Mamata, however, alleged that the BJP-led government at the Centre merely repackaged old projects. “The freight corridor was mentioned in my Railway Budget in 2009. I had mentioned Dankuni and Amritsar. There has been no spending on this for the last 15 years,” she claimed.