The river has a name older than memory. Before the Bhagirathi shifted its course, before the Hooghly was widened by silt and monsoon into the channel that defines Kolkata today, there was the Adi Ganga—the Primal Ganga—an ancient distributary flowing southward through what is now the heart of South Kolkata. It is said to have been the original sacred waterway, the river by which the Ganges first reached the sea. Pilgrims bathed in it, merchants sailed it, and the first Bengali settlements that would grow into a commercial colossus were planted on its banks. Today the Adi Ganga is a shadow of itself—choked with effluent, reduced to a trickle in many stretches, its ghats crumbling, its sacredness dishonoured. But its fate is more than ecological tragedy. It is a metaphor for the story of Bengal itself: a civilisation of extraordinary vitality brought low by a combination of neglect, mismanagement, and a failure of collective imagination.
That failure has a statistical face. Once the industrial heartland of the British Empire and, at Independence, the third-largest contributor to India’s GDP at 10.5% in 1960-61, West Bengal has experienced what the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister described in 2024 as a “consistent decline throughout this period.” By 2023-24, the state’s share of national GDP had fallen to just 5.6%. Its per capita income, which stood at 127.5% of the national average in 1960-61, had slid to 83.7% by 2023-24—below states like Rajasthan and Odisha. The industrial sector, which accounted for 9.8% of total national industrial output in 1980-81, had declined to 5% by 1997-98. The GSDP currently stands at approximately Rs 13.97 lakh crore (around US$150 billion)—substantial in absolute terms, but far below what a state with Bengal’s geography, history, and human capital should command. The Adi Ganga, one might say, was Bengal itself: ancient, powerful, and quietly silting up.
Yet the geography has not changed. The Ganges-Brahmaputra delta remains the largest river delta on Earth. Kolkata, at its head, sits at one of the most strategically extraordinary positions in all of Asia—the natural gateway between the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and the Bay of Bengal. The port of Kolkata, the oldest operating major port in India, handled 70.87 million tonnes of cargo in 2025-26 and 960,549 TEUs of containerised traffic. These are not negligible numbers—but they are a fraction of what a properly configured, deeply invested port at the mouth of the Ganga ought to handle. Mumbai’s Jawaharlal Nehru Port handles over five million TEUs annually. The gap is not a measure of natural disadvantage. It is a measure of arrested potential.
The key to unlocking that potential lies in recognising what the Bay of Bengal has become, and what it is about to become. 25% of all global maritime trade already passes through these waters. The Bay is home to nearly 1.6 billion people across its rim nations, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, together with the landlocked Bhutan and Nepal, all members of BIMSTEC, the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation. The blue economy of the Bay, encompassing fisheries, offshore energy, tourism, and shipping, is estimated to carry a potential worth over $500 billion. India’s Union Minister for Ports has stated a national ambition to expand port capacity six-fold, reaching 10,000 million tonnes per annum by 2047 and entering the top five global shipping nations. The 2025 BIMSTEC Maritime Transport Cooperation Agreement aims to harmonise customs and port rules across all seven member states. The architecture of a new Bay of Bengal economy is being assembled, piece by piece. The question is whether Kolkata—once the undisputed queen of this maritime world—will lead it, or merely observe it.
To lead it, West Bengal must undertake a structural industrial revival of a scope not seen since the 1950s. The state’s current GSDP of Rs 20.32 lakh crore (US$236.56 billion projected for 2025-26) is growing at 12% annually, and the industrial sector grew at 7.3% in 2024-25, marginally above the national average of 6.2%. But growth rates on a diminished base are insufficient. Bengal needs a deliberate reindustrialisation strategy built on five pillars.
The first is port-led development. Haldia, the deepsea arm of the Kolkata port complex, must be developed into a genuine world-class transshipment hub. Adani Ports has already signed a concession agreement with Syama Prasad Mookerjee Port for the mechanisation of Berth No. 2 at Haldia—a beginning, not a conclusion. Investment in a deepwater channel, intermodal rail-port connectivity, and a dedicated logistics park at Haldia could transform it into the Rotterdam of the Bay of Bengal. Bangladesh’s ports at Chittagong and Mongla are already linked into this network by agreement. Nepal and Bhutan, landlocked, depend critically on Kolkata for their seaborne trade. The region is pre-configured for a Bengal-anchored logistics hub. It requires only the political will and investment architecture to make it so.
The second pillar is manufacturing. Bengal has latent strengths that are chronically underutilised. It possesses Asia’s largest leather complex at the Kolkata Leather Complex in Bantala, with 500 tanneries across 1,150 acres employing five lakh workers, with further investments of Rs 10,000 crore announced in July 2024 to add 187 more tanneries and 139 footwear units. It has steel and heavy engineering plants in Durgapur. It has a chemical and fertiliser industry at Haldia. It has the secondhighest concentration of MSME units in India, with 88.67 lakh units accounting for 14% of the national total. What Bengal lacks is the policy ecosystem, land acquisition clarity, labour law reform, single-window clearance, that converts these assets into an integrated industrial fabric. The state’s eight consecutive Global Business Summits have attracted pledged investments of Rs 23.94 lakh crore, though the translation of pledges into ground-level investment remains the critical challenge.
The third pillar is the digital and knowledge economy. Kolkata has historically been India’s intellectual capital—the city of Tagore and Bose, of Ray and Sen. The state has 63.75 million internet subscribers. NASSCOM ranks Bengal’s power infrastructure best in the country. Yet FDI inflows between October 2019 and September 2024 amounted to only Rs 13,346 crore (approximately US$1.7 billion)—a fraction of what Tamil Nadu or Karnataka attracts in a single year. A serious IT and deep-tech investment corridor, anchored at a redesigned New Town Kolkata with world-class transit and institutional infrastructure, could position Bengal as the technology bridge between South Asia and Southeast Asia. Haldia Petrochemicals’ proposed Rs 8,500 crore polycarbonate plant, announced in 2025, signals that high-value manufacturing investment is possible when the conditions are right.
The fourth pillar is the blue economy. Bengal’s 158-kilometre coastline, its fisheries, its offshore energy potential, and its proximity to the Sundarbans—the world’s largest mangrove forest and a site of extraordinary biodiversity—constitute an economic frontier that has barely been touched. Regulated aquaculture, offshore wind energy, eco-tourism, and marine biotechnology are all sectors in which Bengal’s natural endowments give it a structural advantage. The state is already a leading exporter of shrimps; with investment in cold chain infrastructure and processing, it could command a far larger share of the global seafood market.
The fifth and most underestimated pillar is cultural economy. No city in Asia has a cultural inheritance quite like Kolkata’s. It is the city that produced the Bengali Renaissance, that nurtured the first stirrings of Indian modernity, that gave the world Rabindranath Tagore, Satyajit Ray, Amartya Sen, and a literary tradition of unparalleled richness. This is not sentiment—it is an economic asset. Cultural tourism, design, publishing, film, fashion, and the creative industries are among the fastest-growing sectors globally. A Bengal that systematically leveraged its cultural brand, as Florence has done for Italy, or Kyoto for Japan, would attract both high-value tourism and the skilled, mobile creative class that anchors knowledge economy clusters.
The Adi Ganga itself offers a final, and non-metaphorical, opportunity. The river is already the focus of a long-overdue restoration movement. Dredging, sewage interception, and ghat rehabilitation, if pursued with the seriousness that Seoul brought to the Cheonggyecheon stream or Singapore to the Singapore River, could restore it to navigability and ecological health. A restored Adi Ganga, lined with heritage ghats and cultural institutions, flowing through a revitalised South Kolkata, would be a symbol visible to the world—the signal that Bengal had chosen renewal.
The primal river is still there, beneath the neglect. So is Bengal. The geography is magnificent, the human capital is extraordinary, the maritime moment is arriving. What is required is a convergence of imaginative governance, serious investment, and a recovered belief in what Bengal has always been: not a periphery, but a centre. The Bay of Bengal is not India’s backwater. It is Asia’s next great economic theatre. And Kolkata, if it chooses, can be its stage.
- Hindol Sengupta is professor, and executive dean, of the school of international affairs, and director of the India Institute, at the O.P. Jindal Global University.
