With interest payments consuming 20% of Bengal’s revenue and Yuva Sathi drawing 81 lakh applicants, whoever wins in 2026 inherits a fiscal crisis.
By NIRENDRA DEV
Kolkata, March 27, 2026 — There is a particular kind of political courage that consists entirely of spending money you do not have, on promises you cannot keep, to people who will not remember the bill when it arrives. Mamata Banerjee has perfected it.
West Bengal goes to the polls carrying a public debt of ₹7.35 lakh crore — 35.7 per cent of the state’s gross domestic product, according to the RBI’s latest 2025-26 estimates. The state borrowed ₹1.2 lakh crore in the last fiscal year alone. Interest payments now consume 20 per cent of revenue receipts. Whatever the verdict in 2026, the next government — Trinamool or BJP — will inherit not a treasury but a wound.
Mamata Banerjee remains, to all appearances, entirely unfazed.
The Mother of Freebies
The Chief Minister’s political genius has always been the same: turn dependency into loyalty. Her latest instrument is Yuva Sathi, an unemployment allowance scheme that drew 81 lakh applicants when initial projections had estimated 30 lakh. On paper it is a welfare programme. In practice it doubled as a grassroots mobilisation machine for the Trinamool Congress in an election year.
There is nothing new about this model. West Bengal has been here before. The CPI(M) governments of the Jyoti Basu era ran what Bengalis candidly called Bekar Bhata — unemployment allowance — which critics said rewarded joblessness over ambition. Yuva Sathi is the same scheme in new packaging. The communism of the Basu era did not die when the Left lost power in 2011. It simply changed its electoral uniform.
Mrinal Das, a TMC booth worker in Jadavpur, captured the scheme’s appeal with accidental honesty. “Even after online registrations, people were still showing enthusiasm,” he said. “The refrain being — if Mamata Banerjee is giving some cash, why not take it? We pay taxes.”
It is a sentiment that is difficult to argue against at an individual level and catastrophic at a collective one.
Registration camps buzzed with party workers distributing forms, running helpdesks, and building voter lists. In Howrah, Shampa Das — 24 years old, a Master’s degree in English in hand — joined the queue with her mark sheets. In Kharda, Saju Mallick, a B Pharm graduate, described it as his first step toward financial independence.
The Trinamool’s response to criticism was typically brazen. The party claimed it had created 40 to 50 lakh jobs since 2011 and that Yuva Sathi merely bridges whatever gap remains. CPI(M) leader Mohammed Salim was having none of it. “It’s a vote-buying stunt at the cost of the self-pride of Bengali youth,” he said, “and it is draining the state’s coffers.”
He is not wrong on the numbers. Lakshmir Bhandar — Mamata’s flagship cash transfer to women — has ballooned from ₹10,000 crore to ₹18,000 crore annually, funded substantially through borrowings. The Union government withheld ₹7,000 crore in GST compensation last year, citing irregularities. Yuva Sathi is heading down the same fiscal corridor.
The TMC’s electoral calculation
The Trinamool Congress enters this election with one overriding fear: that governance becomes the story.
The RG Kar Medical College rape and murder case, women’s safety, law and order, the syndicate economy — these are the terrain on which the TMC does not wish to fight. The party’s preferred battlefield is identity and grievance. It has framed the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls — SIR — as a conspiracy by the Modi government to disenfranchise Bengali voters. The election, in Trinamool’s telling, is a referendum on Bengali identity and Centre-state dignity, not on 15 years of governance.
It is a clever displacement strategy. Whether it works depends on whether voters allow the conversation to be moved.
The BJP’s counter
The BJP’s campaign rests on four pillars: corruption that has stalled Bengal’s development despite its natural advantages of human capital, land, and coastal geography; demographic change and infiltration; administrative politicisation; and the unaddressed grievances of communities the Left once held and the Trinamool subsequently captured.
The party has concentrated its community outreach on Matuas, Rajbanshis, Gorkhalis, and tribal voters. Its harder target is the Bhadralok — the educated, professional class that moved from the Left to the Trinamool in 2011 and stayed. Dislodging that base requires making governance and economic mismanagement the dominant conversation. It also requires, in BJP’s internal calculus, consolidating Hindu voters across caste lines — a strategy that carries its own risks in a state with a substantial Muslim population.
The celebrity calculation
In the 2026 election, both parties have largely stepped back from the film-star politics that characterised earlier Bengal contests. The Trinamool has dropped sitting MLAs from the entertainment world — actor Kanchan Mallick lost his seat for non-performance — while retaining those like Raj Chakraborty and Arundhati Maitra who have maintained party discipline. The BJP has fielded entertainment figures only where they carry genuine organisational credibility built over years.
The glamour economy of Bengal politics is quietly contracting.
The bill that awaits
The harder truth is this: freebies win elections. The evidence from Bengal, and from several other Indian states, is reasonably conclusive on that point. What freebies do not do is build economies. They do not create the manufacturing base that Bengal’s location and workforce should long since have attracted. They do not fix the infrastructure deficit. They do not address the political economy of the syndicate system that has made legitimate investment in the state an obstacle course.
If the BJP wins in 2026, it will inherit a state whose fiscal architecture has been deliberately built around electoral dependency. Unwinding that — cutting schemes, enforcing fiscal discipline, absorbing the political cost of austerity — will require a kind of governing courage that is rare anywhere and almost unheard of in Bengal.
If the Trinamool wins, the borrowing continues, the interest compounds, and the reckoning is deferred to a future government’s problem.
Either way, West Bengal’s economy does not get a freebie.
(This is an opinion piece. Views expressed are author’s own.)
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