Reform or perish: Marxist state's sunrise tinges red rupee pink

http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,16781,1678001,00.html

Outside the eight-storey headquarters of West Bengal's state-owned handloom promotions company, Tantuja, flutter red flags stamped with a hammer and sickle. Inside the warren of offices, clerks yawn amid nose-high stacks of files and sip endless cups of tea. The Tantuja business encompasses a 100 stores selling saris, bed linen and cotton towels, a personnel department and even an in-house trade union, which has a room lined with pictures of Marx, Engels and Lenin. It employs 1,100 people.

No one can remember when the government enterprise set up in the 1950s to serve "the marginal weavers in villages in West Bengal" last made a profit. Last year it lost 80m rupees (£1m).

Calcutta, the first capital of the British Raj, is a bastion of Indian communism. The left has run this Indian state for almost three decades, a period which has seen West Bengal become a byword for labour unrest. But in recent years, like its ideological cousin in China, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), has been busy rebranding itself - bearhugging foreign investors and Indian businessmen.

The upshot is a pell-mell rush in Calcutta to create a landscape far removed from the slums and squalor that many people imagine on hearing the city's name. Springing up above the colonial bungalows are business towers and glitzy shopping malls. And the communists are about to ban the city's rickshaw pullers, saying the work is inhumane but slyly acknowledging that the trade undermines the state message of being in the throes of radical reforms.