Left Gets It Right Quietly?

Read a very pleasantly surprising editorial, in TOI, today. About a state which is normally roundly denounced in articles like one which I'm going to link to below. But the numbers in the editorial surprised me pleasantly.

• for the last 10 years, the state's domestic product has jumped 7.1 per cent every year, ahead of Karnataka's 6.4 per cent, Gujarat's 6.1 per cent or Haryana's 5.8 per cent.
• the average person's income in the state has grown 5.5 per cent, the fastest in India.
• rural people of the state spent Rs 17,000 crore last year on non-farm goods and services.
• over the last 13 years, according to the Planning Commission, the state has got a staggering Rs 27,000 crore worth of private industrial investment, second only to Gujarat, ahead of Maharashtra.

What I found most heartening was this (emphasis added)

...farm tenancy reforms implemented in 1978 — the same year China allowed farmers to sell their produce — have paid off. In India, people who actually work 85 per cent of all farmland own only 33 per cent land. In Bengal, tillers own 80 per cent of farmland. Unsurprisingly, holdings are hugely productive, churning out four crops a year. For about 10 years, farm output has jumped more than 5 per cent annually, the fastest clip in the country. Long India's biggest rice producer, Bengal is now the largest grower of pineapples and vegetables, the second-largest producer of potatoes and a big grower of quality mangoes.

If India lives in her villages, the state seems to have done well by her - better than the country as a whole has done at least. Kudos are in order I think.

The name of the state? Left-ruled West Bengal. Here is a cry of despair about the Left driving WB poor to suicide and here is the editorial from TOI from which the above figures and quotes are taken. As the editorial notes, there are problems - below-par job creation, worker militancy among other things. And there is a rare opportunity too as it points out.