New Delhi: At least 448 listed companies have left West Bengal between 1 April 2011 and 30 September 2025, and another 6,447 unlisted companies have left the state in the same period, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said in the Rajya Sabha Thursday amid sloganeering by TMC MPs.
“Subject to correction—1947, when India got its independence, the contribution for West Bengal for industry in the country’s GDP was somewhere in the range of 27 percent—subject to correction. But today, it has come down to a minimum of 3 percent,” she added.
Sitharaman was responding in a debate on the Central Excise (Amendment) Bill, 2025, during which TMC MP Sagarika Ghose urged the Centre to “stop the neglect of Bengal”.
In response, Sitharaman said she can list down all the things that the Centre has done for the state. “West Bengal has never been ignored by this government. In fact, it is TMC, which is hurting the growth of the people of West Bengal,” she said.
Highlighting that in January 2019, Bengal withdrew from the Ayushman Bharat, she asked, “Is that good for Bengal?…. People are suffering from gundabazi (thuggery) of TMC.”
In Bengal, the TMC government had withdrawn from Ayushman Bharat, alleging it had been contributing 40 percent of funds for the scheme, but the Centre had not shared the credit with the state and instead sent letters with the PM’s photo to beneficiaries. At the time, it had also cited the state-funded health insurance that covers all citizens.
MGNREGA funds
In her speech, Ghose said that the Government of India does not practice cooperative federalism but “discriminatory federalism” instead. She said the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) workers in Bengal had not received their wages since 2022.
“Nearly two lakh crore is due to the state of West Bengal from the Union Government across various schemes…People are suffering because this government has not released the wages of MGNREGA workers,” she said.
Earlier this year, a standing committee on rural development and Panchayati Raj reported widespread misappropriation of nearly Rs 193 crore across states. Bengal received Rs 7,507.80 crore in FY2021-22 under MGNREGA, and then starting 9 March 2022, the state had not received any funds in the following three fiscal years.
In 2022, then Union MoS for Rural Development Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, in a written reply in the Parliament, had stated that Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Telangana account for the majority of the misappropriated funds.
In Bengal, Rs 5.37 crore was misappropriated, and of that, Rs 2.39 crore or 40 percent had been recovered while Rs 3.02 crore remained unaccounted for, according to a March 2025 statement in the Parliament by the current Union MoS for Rural Development, Chandra Sekhar Pemmasani.
On Thursday, Sitharaman said that under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005, it is the responsibility of the state government to ensure transparency and accountability in the implementation of the scheme.
She said that based on the central team’s inspection reports highlighting implementation issues, the Ministry of Rural Development has sent several communications to Bengal asking for rectification. Since there is still some rectification pending, the funds have been stopped since March 2022 under Section 27 of the Act, she added, citing Bengal’s non-compliance with the Centre’s directives.
She told the House that in Bengal’s latest action taken report, dated 11 July 2025, the state reported the completion of financial recoveries of Rs 4.81 crore from four districts for rectification, further speaking of the disciplinary action initiated in this regard. “This, itself, is an admission that things were misused,” Sitharaman said, leading to another uproar from TMC members.
She also told the House that between 2006-07 to 2013-14, the central funds released to West Bengal under MGNREGA stood at 14,985 crore, and between 2014-15 to 2021-22, the Modi government released 54,416 crore, showing a 261 percent increase.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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