History of Kolkata - After Independence

After Independence

The intense violence caused during the partition of India led to a shift in demographics in Bengal, and especially Kolkata; large numbers of Muslims left for East Pakistan, while hundreds of thousands of Hindus arrived to take their place. Kolkata received millions of refugees from what became East Pakistan without receiving substantial assistance from the central government.

Over the 1960s and 1970s, severe power shortages, strikes and a violent Marxist-Maoist movement — the Naxalites — damaged much of the city's infrastructure, leading to economic stagnation. (Ironically, this is the same city that has historically been a strong base of Indian communism: West Bengal was ruled by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) dominated Left Front for nearly three decades — the world's longest-running democratically elected communist government.) In 1971, the war between India and Pakistan led to another massive influx of refugees from the former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and their settling in Kolkata massively strained its already damaged infrastructure.

In the mid-1980s, Mumbai overtook Kolkata as India's most populous city.

Kolkata became plagued by power outages, labor unrest, disappearing industry, and violence from the Naxalite movement. In 1985 Rajiv Gandhi referred to Kolkata as a "dying city" because of the social and political traumas.

The city's economic recovery gathered momentum after economic reforms in India introduced by the central government in the mid-1990s. Since 2000, Information Technology (IT) services revitalized the city's stagnant economy. The city has also experienced a growth in the manufacturing sector. Following similar moves elsewhere in the country, the state government changed the city's official name from Calcutta to Kolkata in 2001.