Despite many efforts by the state government led by Smt. Mamata Banerjee to curb the menace of mafia and syndicates in Bengal, the issue seems to be acting like a dormant wildfire especially in the urban and semi-urban real estate and construction sector. The state government has taken some steps in curbing the issue of syndicate in the state. Most important is the instruction given by CM to the state police to not hesitate to arrest or detain any person involved in such syndicate nexus even if they are legislators from the ruling party.

These syndicates operate heavily in the construction sector, where they would force the builders, contractors, owners of private houses to procure the construction materials like cement, lime, chips inter alia from their suppliers. These suppliers would provide substandard construction materials, that too at a price way higher than the market rate. The downstream effect of this gets reflected in the higher prices of the properties being developed in the various construction hubs in and around Kolkata. The developers and builders pass on the extra price which they had to pay in the form of goonda tax to the property buyers. This results in a peculiar trend of the price of the properties in Kolkata region. The properties in the regions like New town and Rajarhat tend to be somewhat costlier than those in the well-developed places like Noida and other urban centres in India.

Story inside Kolkata is much more concerning. Regions connected to the EM bypass are under the shadows of the dangerous syndicate raj in the various construction projects. With EM Bypass going through it perpendicularly, Kasba, with Prince Anwar Shah road on one side and Kasba connector on the other, has been the hub of growth of construction business. From 2013 to 2018, the property prices nearly doubled in the area, with the regions around the Acropolis witnessing new upcoming housing complexes. This caused an increase in the demand of construction materials and landfilling items. It, in turn, led to the local conflicts between the syndicates in that particular region. In Kasba alone, over 50 groups are active in areas earmarked by different political leaders. This subsequently has led to an increase in the crime rate in the region.

The players in the syndicates provide the money and muscle power to the various parties ahead of locally relevant elections like the civil polls and the legislative assembly election. As of now, due to the pervasive nature of the Covid19 pandemic, the civil polls for the KMC have been deferred by the state election commission on the request of both the TMC and BJP. The pandemic has also dealt a heavy blow to the edifice of the syndicate mafia especially due to the prolonged lockdowns. This structure of the syndicate-politician nexus helps the concerned parties to gain mileage in the season of the elections, be it at the vidhan sabha level or at the national poll level.

Development of a new town in the aforementioned place-Rajarhat was the original backdrop against which the syndicate culture gained prominence in the Bengal socio-politics. In the year 1995, the then Left front government in West Bengal, to fulfil the increasing housing demands, started the Rajarhat project. Almost 250000 families were estimated to be displaced by the project. As a measure of relief, a cooperative was raised by then state minister of urban development, Gautam deb. It had 2000 people who were displaced, and who would be supplying the construction materials for the property development projects in the region. That idea of cooperative which was supposed to help the displaced spawned a new era of a multitude of small groups who were later locally known as the syndicates.  That gave rise to power brokers at the local level who would have a miniature army of unemployed youth to run the syndicates. An interesting facet of these small groups is that their political patronage is liable to shift over the tenures of governments. Rise of these syndicates have been fuelled consistently due to the increasing number of semi poor and poor youth in the semi urban and urban regions of Bengal. They remain allied with a particular group and remain associated with it for a long time. It is because of two reasons, first the association with a syndicate assures a kind of protection and second, it ensures them a more or less stable source of income.

In the hindsight, had the then urban development ministry set up a special purpose vehicle with an experienced player in the construction sector for eg: GMR, in order to handle the project development instead of floating the cooperative, then this syndicate issue might not have grown to be a such a goliath. To rehabilitate the displaced, works could have been found in the construction projects in that region. Even the MGNREGA related works always remain as a failsafe option for such people, as evinced in Bengal in the Pandemic period after a large number of workers returned back to the state.

Problem with this syndicate issue is that there are too many such groups in the Kolkata region itself, with many operating as far as the township of Serampore where construction sector is growing albeit slowly due to Covid19. Understanding their inter-relationships with the politicians and the suppliers would be a rigmarole process in itself. Their loyalty and political patronage also remain fluid and pliable. Curbing this menace would be a humongous task as it involves a layered structure of employment guarantee scheme among the involved youth who are otherwise unemployed. This problem should not be ignored by the state administration and police as this provides easily available manpower for any political organization of national scale with vested interests in the Bengal polity. To hope that the syndicates would gradually go away in the coming years is naïve. But caution must be utilised and it must be understood that they remain a trap for the youth to remain essentially unemployed or rather unemployable and this trap can spill onto future generations. The local administration hence must ensure that the ground level power brokers do not play with the long term future of the population under the umbrella of the syndicate raj.