April 23, 2013
by Partho Sarathi Ray
The collapse of the chit fund company, Saradha group, is having major
repercussions all over Bengal. Over the last two days, thousands of
their depositors and agents have been staging protests in front of their
offices all over the state, and many of the offices and real estate
properties have been attacked and destroyed by desperate agents. Roads
have been blocked in many places and there have been pitched battles
with the police. Then the protests had moved to the home of the chief
minister Mamata Banerjee, considered to be one of the major patrons of
the company, where they were lathicharged and around 45 arrested. Then
they protested in front of the Trinamool Congress headquarters but have
been removed from there too. The agents are in dire conditions as they
cannot even go back to their localities as the depositors who have lost
their money are waiting there for them. Two agents have already
committed suicide, in Diamond Harbour and Durgapur, and heart-rending
scenes of devastated depositors are being witnessed everywhere.
The chit fund business, which has been going on for the last decade,
has shown a phenomenal increase over the last two years, the total
number going up from 65 to 135 during this period. These are all owned
by small-time Bengali enterpreuners, who started in the real estate
business, and then moved to the chit fund business with direct political
links helping them in the process. Many of them had connections with
the CPI(M) when the Left Front was in power (the nephew of Amitava
Nandi, an influential party leader from North 24 Parganas is the owner
of one), but ever since the TMC came to power, their influence and reach
have increased exponentially. The close ties of these businesses with
the ruling TMC, starting from Mamata Banerjee onwards, have allowed them
to expand their business phenomenally and flout every financial norm
and regulation. Among these, the three major were Saradha group, Rose
Valley and MPS. The money they gained in the chit fund business was
pumped into all types of other businesses such as real estate, hotels
and media.
The Saradha group, owned by Sudipta Sen who has now disappeared after
writing a 18 page letter to the CBI accusing many leaders of the TMC
and the Congress of being in his payroll, apparently has bought
thousands of acres of land all over Bengal, with the help of local TMC
leaders. One of their major real estate development sites, off Diamond
Harbour road in South 24 Parganas, reportedly was a recreational centre
for political leaders, business tycoons and media barons. Their media
business, consisting of Bengali, Hindi and Urdu newspapers and three TV
channels were consistent and vocal supporters of the TMC and the
government. Among the seven newspapers, which the Mamata government
ordered public libraries in West Bengal to subscribe to, four belonged
to the Saradha group. The chief editor of their Bengali newspaper, and
the main public face of the group, Kunal Ghosh was made into a Rajya
Sabha MP by the TMC. Today, he is claiming that he was “only a salaried
employee” of the company. These newspapers, and the TV channel Channel
10, constantly vilified all opponents against the government and made
baseless accusations against many of them. Shatabdi Roy, another TMC MP,
was the brand ambassador of the group. Madan Mitra, the transport and
sports minister, is the leader of the employees union. Mamata herself
inaugarated their Urdu daily Kalam in a glittering function. Sudipta Sen
was a major buyer of Mamata’s paintings, the last one was bought for Rs
1 crore 86 lakhs. Today Mamata Banerjee and the TMC is desperate to
show their distance from the Saradha group but in the peoples’ eyes they
are closely identified with them. And this had allowed the company also
to leverage their proximity to the ruling party to gain peoples’ trust
and draw more investment into their chit fund scheme. Also, at least
three letters from the PMO to the West Bengal government over the last
one year, asking for the government to check the activities of the
Saradha group, were disregarded, allowing them a free hand to go about
their business. A bill passed by the West Bengal assembly during the
Left Front rule to regulate the activities of the chit funds is
languishing for presidential assent for the last three years. All these
shows the extent of the connivance of this upcoming bourgeois class with
the ruling party and its leaders, and the way the government has been
subservient to their interests. There are even whisperings that the
meetings between the representatives of the CPI(Maoist) and the
government interlocutors were held in the resort owned by one such
company on the outskirts of Jhargram.
The activities of these chit funds have also adversely affected the
government small savings schemes, such as the post-office based schemes,
where the government has also cut down the interest rates and where the
investment has gone down from Rs 12000 crore two years back to Rs 1500
crore only, whereas companies such as Saradha has seen investment of Rs
22000 crore in the same period, all of which has now disappeared ruining
2.5 lakh investors in the process.
Source: Sanghati
