West Bengal will take back industrial plots lacking active plans or secured funding as the state prepares a new policy and courts fresh investment.
West Bengal is moving to tighten its grip on idle industrial land as the state tries to accelerate investment and make room for new projects. Chief Secretary Manoj Agarwal said on Wednesday that any land allotted for development but left unused should either be put to work quickly or returned to the government, describing available land as a scarce resource at a time when investors from India and overseas are showing renewed interest in the state.
Agarwal said the chief minister had already taken a Cabinet decision that land would be taken back if there was no active project plan and no funding had been secured. The idea, he added, is to redirect such parcels towards industrialisation and other projects deemed worthwhile by the administration.
The remarks came at Haldia during the inauguration of an integrated phenol and acetone manufacturing plant set up by Adperma Private Limited, a subsidiary of The Chatterjee Group’s Haldia Petrochemicals Limited. According to the company and state officials at the event, the plant has involved direct investment of ₹6,000 crore, with a further ₹10,000 crore pipeline of spending still to come. The unit is said to be India’s largest of its kind, with annual capacity of 345,000 tonnes of phenol and 215,000 tonnes of acetone.
The chief minister used the occasion to promise a new industrial policy before Diwali, with provisions covering incentives, land allocation and power tariffs. Speaking at the same event, he argued that West Bengal had spent 15 years under the burden of poor land policy, shrinking incentives and what he called a syndicate culture that discouraged business. A separate report by Indian Express said the government is preparing to unveil a broader industrial policy before the festival, while other local reports have said the draft could also include measures such as a single-window system and clearer rules on land access.
Purnendu Chatterjee, chairman of The Chatterjee Group, cast the Haldia project as part of a longer industrial build-out, saying the company was now moving from a petrochemical base into a broader speciality chemicals ecosystem. Navanit Narayan, managing director and chief executive of Haldia Petrochemicals, said the new plant should generate more than ₹5,000 crore in annual revenue from next year and would support the country’s push towards import substitution and value-added manufacturing.
Chatterjee also pressed the state to think beyond traditional industry and target faster-growing sectors such as deep technology, artificial intelligence, data centres, robotics and quantum computing. He argued that West Bengal needs to capture a share of the profit pool in those areas if it wants to fund jobs and welfare over the long term, and suggested a 2047 master plan backed by a permanent capital fund.
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