SWEDISH SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES NETWORK

---

First Report from Kolkata 2005:

by Lars Eklund and Staffan Lindberg

Industrialisation under protest

The political climate seems calm today compared to earlier days. The state of West Bengal is doing fairly well economically under the firmly established Left Front regime, dominated by the Communist Party of India – Marxist, CPI(M), with its current plans to re-industrialise the state after several decades of capital’s flight for fear of communism and strong trade unions. Now the situation is different, strikes are uncommon, foreign investments are welcome and the IT sector is booming.

Still Frontline magazine, in its 18 November 2005 issue, had an article about protests against plans by the Multinational Salim Group of Indonesia to invest in what is called a ‘knowledge city’ south of Kolkata (read the article). It was going to begin with a motorcycle manufacturing unit in Howrah, on the western bank of the river Hooghly, but later on the plans for the knowledge city also included a ‘health city’ for health tourists from abroad, research in the fields of biotechnology, nanotechnology, biophysics and so on.
The protesters come both from the opposition party Trinamul Congres, led by Mamata Baneerji, and from the ultra-leftist CPI-ML who have launched demonstrations and built road-blocks to get their message out: land will be taken from farmers and sold to foreigners. Though compensation would be given to the farmers, this does not impress on the protesters, who claim that West Bengal should continue to rely on its rich agriculture for development, reminding of the utopias against industrialism fought by the Luddites in England as well as the Narodnikies in Russia more than hundred years ago. What is not mentioned though is the close connection between the dictatorial Suharto regime and the Salim Group, which also seem to be a strong motive of the protesters.

Commerce as the driving force in academic development

No such protests seem forthcoming, however, about the West Bengal government’s plans to set up a big biotechnology park at Calcutta University in collaboration with the city based firm Chem Gen Pharma to promote investment and research in this field. Similar projects are planned by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kharagpur and by Kalyani University, both institutions close to Kolkata. The parks will be open for investments by private firms, have world class laboratories and aim at attracting scholars also from abroad. To us this is but one of many evidences of India’s quick ascendancy to world leading positions in science and technology and that too driven and funded by commercial forces. So is this the tune of the future for Indian academia? What can Swedish university based science offer, or maybe learn, under these circumstances? What of the future of the humanities and the social sciences then? Will it become all business and management oriented? Will there be a slow but steady starvation of history and culture oriented research? We have just about started our journey.