Kolkata: Swapan Dasgupta and Jagannath Chattopadhyay, the two journalist-turned-politicians who were allotted crucial cabinet berths in the West Bengal government on Wednesday, set their immediate agendas soon after the portfolio distribution was announced earlier in the day.
For Dasgupta, the target is to increase the state’s own tax revenue without imposing an additional burden on people through an upward revision of the existing tax structure.
“There is no logic that the state’s own tax revenue can be increased just by increasing the tax rates. At times, even a reduction in the tax rate can increase tax revenue. So, my prime target is to increase the state’s own tax revenue collection but without an upward revision in the existing tax rates,” Dasgupta said after taking charge as the new Finance Minister of West Bengal.
During the previous Mamata Banerjee-led West Bengal government, the main complaint of economists was the limited avenues for the state’s own tax generation, which were mainly dependent on two heads: State Goods and Services Tax (SGST) and state excise.
The new Finance Minister seems to be directly addressing that concern of economists about the fiscal health of West Bengal in the backdrop of a cash-strapped state exchequer, rising accumulated debt, and huge non-plan expenditure.
The budget session of the West Bengal Assembly is scheduled to start from June 18, and the full budget will be presented by Dasgupta on June 21.
On February 5 this year, the previous West Bengal Minister of State for Finance (Independent Charge), Chandrima Bhattacharya, presented the interim (vote-on-account) budget on the floor of the Assembly.
The full budget could not be presented then due to the West Bengal Assembly elections in April, held on May 4.
As for Chattopadhyay, his prime agenda as the state’s Higher Education Minister will be to clean up the education system in the state from the riddles of multi-pronged corruption, which became rampant during the previous Trinamool Congress regime, as well as to take the state’s higher education system to new heights by implementing the national education policy.
At the same time, he said that enforcing “punctuality in attendance” in higher education institutes in the state will also be his agenda as Higher Education Minister.
“West Bengal needs to be taken further forward in the field of education. We will work as a team. The goal is to restore Bengal’s excellence in higher education. From now on, recruitment will be conducted regularly through the School Service Commission and the College Service Commission. And those recruitment processes will be absolutely transparent and free of corruption. My goal is to clean up corruption from the system and make West Bengal number one in the country in the field of education,” said Chattopadhyay, who has the reputation of an excellent investigative journalist in his pre-political life.
