The 2022 bonhomie between Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and business tycoon Gautam Adani formally entered the choppy waters with her Government on Wednesday dissolving the Letter of Intent given to the Adani Ports to develop the Tajpur deep sea port off Digha sea beach in East Midnapore district.

Though senior Trinamool Congress leaders refused to link the Government’s withdrawal of the LoI with the reported silent tussle between TMC MP Mahua Moitra and the Adanis in the cash-for-query matter sources said “one half of the (Adani) chapter is over for now.”

Bengal which has seen a massive flight of capital in the past five decades partly on account of political and labour issues and partly because of the fast drying up of the Hooghly river port desperately needs a deep sea port for the State to once again stand up and compete with the nearby Paradip and Visakhapatnam ports.

A day after the Chief Minister made a surprise reference at the ongoing Bengal Global Business Summit of her Government’s decision to re-open the Rs 25,000 crore Tajpur port for international tender sources in the Government said that the LoI given to the Adanis had been dissolved and that the Government would soon invite new tenders.

Opposition BJP however accused the Chief Minister for hiding facts saying it was not the State but the Adanis who had rejected the Tajpur proposal after carrying out a feasibility study. “It is not the Bengal Government which dissolved the LoI but the Adanis which refused to work here,” said a State BJP leader.

Banerjee had on Tuesday said at the BGBS that "the proposed deep sea port at Tajpur is ready. You can all participate in the tender. It will attract an investment of about Rs 25,000 crore," triggering speculations about the fate of the project that the Adani group had intended to develop last year.

Two months after Gautam Adani had attended the 2022 BGBS, Banerjee had in October 2022 given the LoI to Karan Adani of the Adani Ports. Soon the Adanis had announced investments at Tajpur worth Rs 10,000 crore for which an initial survey was also conducted.

However, there was not much development in the project --- about 170 km from Kolkata --- which had a draft of 12.1 metres. Once completed the project was likely to create 25,000 direct and one lakh indirect jobs the TMC government had said.

While the TMC politicians dismissed possibilities of the Mohua Moitra case impacting the Tajpur prospects some sources said that the State withdrew the LoI because it was apprehensive of a clause in an agreement that said the Centre would give clearance to the project only if there was nothing adverse in it.

“The State was apprehensive because the Centre could have pulled out of the project shifting the entire liability on the State’s shoulders … why the State would take that risk,” a source said.

However others said that Chief Minister’s reluctance to tame her MP Moitra who was embarrassing the Adanis in Parliament had irked the business tycoon who was conspicuously absent from the 2023 BGBS.

Meanwhile, in a fresh round of a veiled attack on the Centre the Chief Minister while making a strong pitch for her own State once again told the delegates at the Business Summit how the Opposition States were being strangled by the Centre and how the unfriendly tax regime was making it difficult for the industries to thrive.

She said that despite nationally India had seen a 40 percent drop in employment opportunities her State had seen a 42 percent in creating jobs. Banerjee said that Bengal had received investment proposals worth Rs 3.76 lakh crore in the BGBS.