State icons get raw deal from Mamata, ministers

The Trinamool Congress led by Mamata Banerjee may claim to represent the popular view in West Bengal, but the party seems to have little time or inclination to attend to matters relating to some of the biggest icons of Bengali culture, including Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore and legendary filmmaker Satyajit Ray.







For more than two months now, a proposal from the West Bengal government to develop the sites where Ray shot his famous films including Pather Panchali as tourist destinations has been awaiting the comments and approval of Minister of State for Tourism Sultan Ahmed, who is from the Trinamool.







Ray's masterpiece, Pather Panchali, was partly shot at Boral, which in the 1950s was about 5 km south of Kolkata city. The site has now vanished owing to urbanisation and construction in that area. Many of Ray's other films were shot in the red soil terrain of Birbhum district and some at a few locations around Santiniketan.





Sources told The Indian Express that it was Ahmed's party colleague and MP Kabir Suman who had first floated the idea of rediscovering these sites and developing a tourism circuit around them. The CPM-led West Bengal government liked the idea, prepared a detailed project report and approached the Tourism Ministry in New Delhi for grants to develop these areas as part of a mega-tourist destination.







Tourism Minister Kumari Selja supported the proposal and agreed to grant Rs 50 crore that a mega-tourist destination is entitled to get. But since the issue pertained to West Bengal, Selja thought it fit to consult her junior minister Ahmed. That is where the progress on the project hit the roadblock. The file was sent to Ahmed in March but he has yet to find time to attend to it. As a result, the project is still to take off.


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