I Watched My Father’s Factory Die. Forty Five Years Later I Am Still Asking Why

Last Sunday I was at the Shibpur burning ghat.

My aged uncle had passed away. The family had gathered. There was grief in the air, as there always is at such places. But alongside the grief, there was something else. A quiet, creeping shame.

The infrastructure at that burning ghat was pathetic. I will not dress it up in polite language. Pathetic is the right word. A facility that handles some of the most painful moments of people’s lives looked like it had not seen meaningful attention in decades.

I stood there and thought about my uncle. And then, almost involuntarily, I thought about Bengal.

What it was supposed to be. What it could have been. What it still could become.

And I felt that familiar ache that every Bengali who loves this city carries somewhere deep inside.

I Have Loved This City My Whole Life. Even When It Has Not Made It Easy.

I was born in December 1975.

When I was five years old, my father’s factory was locked down. Trade union strikes. The kind that were happening all over Bengal in those years. My father was not a wealthy man. He was a working man. And when the factory shut, everything shut with it.

I do not say this for sympathy. I say this because it is the truth of what many families in Bengal lived through, and many still live through today.

Getting food twice a day was a struggle in our home until I turned ten. In a city that was once called the cultural capital of India. In a state that had the infrastructure and the intellectual capital to lead this nation.

Like thousands of Bengali young men and women of my generation, I eventually left. Went to Bangalore for studies. Almost stayed. The city had jobs, opportunity, infrastructure that worked, a sense that things were moving forward.

I came back to Kolkata in 2006. A family emergency brought me back. But I made a choice to stay. To build here. And in 2013 I started Brainium in Salt Lake Sector V..

I do not regret that choice for a single day. But I know the cost of it. I know how painfully slow it is to get things done here. I know what poor infrastructure does to ambition. I know what it feels like to watch other cities grow at a pace that makes you quietly wonder why your own city is still not in the same conversation.

I Grew Up Watching Dr. Prannoy Roy On Television.

1989. Lok Sabha elections. A man sitting in a studio with graphs and numbers, predicting​ outcomes with a precision that felt almost magical to a fourteen-year-old watching at home.

I was hooked from that moment. Not on politics. On the numbers. On the data. On the idea that elections were not just about passion and noise but about patterns and trends and what they revealed about what people truly wanted.

I have loved election number crunching ever since. And with the West Bengal Assembly elections of 2026 heating up, with Kolkata going to polls on 29th, with the air full of promises and counter-promises and noise, I find myself going back to that same instinct.

Strip away the noise. Look at the numbers. Look at the facts. And ask the one question that actually matters.

Are we better off?

There Was A Man Who Had A Plan.

Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy was the Chief Minister of West Bengal from 1948 to 1962. He is rightly called the Architect of Modern Bengal.

Think about the context. Bengal had just been torn apart by Partition. Over thirty lakh refugees had poured in. The scars of famine were fresh. The economy was shattered. The social fabric was fraying at every edge.

And into this devastation stepped a man with a blueprint. Not a political blueprint. An engineering blueprint.

He built the Durgapur Steel Plant. He established the Chittaranjan Locomotive Works. He created Durgapur township and Kalyani as planned industrial cities where people could live, work, and study in one place. He established IIT Kharagpur in 1951 and IIM Calcutta in 1961. He expanded Calcutta Medical College, RG Kar, and NRS. He built the Durgapur Barrage. He worked with the Damodar Valley Corporation for flood control and power. He settled thirty lakh refugees with land, schools, and hospitals in areas like Jadavpur, Garia, and Netaji Nagar. He promoted free primary education when it was a radical idea.

He was a doctor. He thought about Bengal the way a doctor thinks about a patient. Diagnose the real problem. Treat the root cause. Build for the long term. Not for the next headline.

His most famous thought was simple: Remember, you are an Indian first.

He did not build for votes. He built for decades.

IIT Kharagpur stands today. IIM Calcutta stands today. Salt Lake City, which he envisioned to decongest Kolkata, stands today. I run my company from there.

He is the reason I have an address.

So What Happened?

I am not going to stand here and point fingers at any party. That is not what this blog is about.

But I am going to ask the question that the data asks.

Bengal was the industrial heartbeat of India at Independence. Today, when people talk about India’s growth story, about the cities driving the economy, about where the jobs are and where the startups are and where the infrastructure investment is flowing, Kolkata is rarely in that conversation.

The brain drain that I lived through personally is not an isolated story. It is a generational pattern. Our best and brightest leave. Some come back, like I did. Most do not.

The factories that my father worked in are largely gone. The industrial base that Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy built has not been replaced with something new. The infrastructure at a burning ghat in Shibpur on a Sunday afternoon in 2026 should not look the way it looked last weekend.

This is not how it was supposed to be.

This is not what he envisioned when he was building steel plants and planned cities and world-class institutions.

Something went wrong somewhere. And every Bengali who loves this state knows it, even if we do not always say it out loud.

But Here Is What I Also Know.

Bengal has everything it needs to be extraordinary.

The intellectual capital is unmatched. The culture runs deep. The hunger for education and achievement is real. I see it every day in the young people who work with me at Brainium. Brilliant, hungry, capable people who want to build something here.

The question is never whether Bengal can. The question is always whether Bengal will be given the conditions to.

Industrialisation. Real jobs. Infrastructure that works. A government that thinks in decades not in election cycles. Policies that invite investment rather than frighten it away. A quality of life that makes our young people want to stay rather than feel they have to leave.

That is not a political manifesto. That is just what every Bengali parent wants for their child.

29th April. Your Turn.

I grew up watching Dr. Prannoy Roy read the numbers on election night.

The numbers always tell you what the people wanted. And what the people want in Bengal, if you strip away all the noise, is simple.

They want to eat well. They want their children to study well. They want jobs that are real and growing. They want infrastructure that works. They want to build their lives here and not feel like leaving is the only option.

Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy understood that. He built for that.

On 29th April, you have a voice.

Do not stay home. Do not get cynical. Do not tell yourself that your vote does not matter.

Go out and vote. Vote for whatever future you believe in. Vote for the Bengal you want your children to grow up in. Vote for the city that should be spoken about in the same breath as Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad but somehow still is not.

We deserve better. Bengal deserves better.

And it starts with showing up.

Tell Me What You Think

Do you believe Bengal can reclaim its place as one of India’s great economic engines?

What do you think is the single biggest thing holding this state back?

Drop it in the comments. I want to have this conversation. Genuinely.