But now Kolkata has no direct flights to Europe and this technical detail has now become one of the loudest political discussions in West Bengal this week. Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari has thrown 15 years of Trinamool Congress government in the dock for the absence of the air corridor and the mountain of debt which has surpassed eight lakh crore rupees, bringing a debate on the state's economic legacy, that has been simmering for years, back to the boil.

Consider the numbers cited by Adhikari, not exactly new, but with new resonance in the chief minister's seat as opposed to the opposition bench. The state's total debt at the time of surrender by the Left Front in 2011 was estimated to be Rs 1.92 to 2 lakh crore. By the end of the just-ended fiscal year it had grown to almost Rs 8 lakh crore, which is almost four times more in 15 years. The estimates, which have been flying around the budget season, peg the total liability at over Rs 8.15 lakh crore or about Rs 70,000 per person in the state. It is not the number that concerns economists who study the figures as much as the percentage of revenue that now goes into servicing interest between 20 percent and more than 25 percent of all the state's revenue, versus 5 percent to 15 percent in most other big states.

The aviation angle, of course, adds a lot to the argument, as it makes the abstract figure on the fiscal statistic a reality for ordinary travellers and business houses in eastern India. British Airways and Lufthansa used to have direct flights from the airport to London and Frankfurt respectively. Both pulled out in successive years, which left Kolkata's outbound European traffic to go through Delhi or Mumbai or through the hubs in the Gulf. Airport officials have only recently begun talks with both airlines, which were held on the sidelines of an aviation conference in China, where they have sought to revive plans for a return, and gathering passenger-traffic figures for the pitch. The industry watchers who have been monitoring the talks are skeptical, observing that long haul carriers rely a lot on premium corporate travel to make a route viable and Kolkata has had little muscle in that area compared to other cities of Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. The lack of the European umbilical cord is an awkward reminder of the city's dwindling economic muscle for a city that boasts itself as the gateway to the Northeast and Southeast Asian countries.

The criticism has been followed by a series of forward-looking measures that are aimed at changing the narrative by the Adhikari government. A single window clearance of investment proposals worth Rs 100 crore has been announced and governments have assured land would not be paralysed at the panchayat or municipal level. The ground breaking ceremony of a big garment factory in the Dankuni belt in the state's Hooghly district was the occasion when the historical debt argument and the investment pitch on the same page was made by the chief minister, who described law and order as the precondition for attracting industry, which, according to his own assertion, is fleeing the state for years. Both political sides invoke the same trend, but for different reasons: the ruling party says that it's the proof of jobs getting lost in another state, while the erstwhile ruling party claims it means job creation failures at the Centre, noting that the government has been failing to pay the dues of roughly one crore workers in West Bengal for their rural jobs, which it estimates has cost it over fifty thousand crore rupees.

The Trinamool camp has been providing counter-arguments in layers. A few within the party's own ranks have been more into pointing fingers than the blame game when it comes to the electoral loss in 2026, and blamed it on the fact organisational decay around a small coterie of advisors, instead of on the state's fiscal record. Even before the shift, a few outsiders, such as the federal ministers who had visited Bengal, had made the point that industrial output had declined even further from the previous Left Front era, driven by the manufacturing share of the national economy shrinking from almost one quarter in the era after independence to a very little part of the total today. Communist party leaders, meanwhile, have a similar debt-trap argument against Trinamool, claiming that the party's welfare spending over the last decade had been pushed aside by capital spending.

The important thing about this dispute is the quantity of numbers involved and the obvious and palpable loss of an air route. In spite of this, West Bengal's economy by nominal output is the sixth largest in India, is expected to be a genuine force in export, tea, rice and engineering goods etc. this year and is projected to reach a gross state product of more than twenty lakh crore rupees in the coming years. The fact that a state with a debt burden equivalent to almost 20 per cent of its output is not able to maintain a single wide-body European service at its main hub leaves it with a credibility issue with investors, no matter who is in power in the country's parliament now. Blaming the previous government is a mantra that every government has embraced when it comes to India's politics and as it can be said the updated fiscal figures under the current dispensation has had to be updated more than once already. The fundamental test of the new announcements for ease of business is whether they get corporate traffic which is what the airlines desperately need before they will fly to Kolkata again.