NEW DELHI/KOLKATA: More than 2,200 companies moved their registered offices out of West Bengal in past five years, with at least 39 of them being listed entities, junior minister for corporate affairs Harsh Malhotra told Parliament.
Malhotra’s reply, in response to a set of questions from BJP MP Samik Bhattacharya in Rajya Sabha on Wednesday, prompted Trinamool Congress to term the MP’s questions as “biased and loaded”, and accuse BJP of being “totally anti-Bengal”.
“The question itself was biased and loaded. BJP’s only aim was to show Bengal in a poor light. The party has always done this. It gets some sort of perverse pleasure from this,” TMC Rajya Sabha MP and party spokesperson Saket Gokhale said on Thursday.
Gokhale questioned why BJP did not ask about the number of new registrations in the same period. “If they wanted to know the entire truth and were interested in getting the complete picture, they would have asked for the number of new registrations as well,” he said.
In his Parliament response, Malhotra said companies cited multiple reasons to move their head offices, ranging from administrative and operational convenience to cost efficiency and better managerial control. It was, however, not specified where the firms moved to.
Companies Act allows companies to shift their registered offices. The exit of 2,227 registered offices covered diverse sectors like manufacturing, finance, commission agencies and trading, the minister said.
Bengal ranked second after Maharashtra in terms of the number of registered companies till 1970s, but it had slipped to the eighth spot by 2021, the latest period for which data could be accessed from ministry of corporate affairs website. Maharashtra was on top, with Mumbai being the preferred destination for most companies.
Trinamool members blamed Bengal’s slide since the 1970s to the erstwhile Left Front govt’s “avowedly anti-industry policies”, while at the same time accusing BJP of trying to create “a fake narrative to demean Bengal”. “They concoct facts, they are motivated, anti-Bengal. The truth is somewhere else. Speak ill of Bengal and get punished by people of the state,” Gokhale said.