Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s initiative to boost up medium scale industries has resulted in action as around 2,200 new factories have come up in West Bengal in the last four years.

State Labour Minister Malay Ghatak said that there was a sharp rise in the registration of new factories in the state in last few years.

A lot of progress has been done in the field of setting up new factories thereby creating a huge number of employments in West Bengal.

It may be mentioned that the state government had simplified the process of registration by introducing online submission of fees for the grant and renewal of license through the GRIPS (Government Receipt Portal System) portal of the state Finance department.

The method introduced in 2014 by the Directorate of Factories under the Labour department has given a new dimension in the entire system as the people can apply for a factory license or a renewal of license online. They can also get an approval from the concerned department online.

After coming to power, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee laid a stress on the setting up of new factories across the state and asked various departments to create conducive atmosphere to attract more investments. As per the instruction of the Chief Minister, the state Labour Department had chalked out an elaborate plan to set up new industries with an aim to create employments and experimented on how to increase the number of factories in the state.

The department has seen considerable amount of success in last four years as 2,200 new factories have been registered under the department during the period. These factories have come up throughout the state most particularly in Burdwan, Howrah, Hooghly, East and West Midnapore and North 24 Parganas.

Ghatak said that these new factories that have come up in last few years are mostly of large and medium scale. He said that during 2011-12 financial year, there were a total of 15,592 registered factories in the state while in 2015-16 the number has gone up to 17,803. Even the fees collected as registration has gone by a huge margin. The department has altogether collected an amount of around Rs 8,68,25,974 in 2015-16 as the registration of new factories whereas the figure stood at 14,125,713 in 2011-12.

The Labour department also started imposing fine for not adhering to the guidelines prescribed by it. Most often it has been seen that the factories do not comply with the rules of the department and fail to meet the parameters.

For this, the senior officials of the department pay time to time visit the factories to examine whether the pollution control unit of the factory has been working or if there were any defects in the boilers of the factories.

In 2015-16 the department has received Rs 4,18,000 as fine while in the last fiscal year the amount collected from the factories as fine was at Rs 15,46,000.

Source: Millennium Post