Government speed is usually an oxymoron. In West Bengal, it’s a punchline. For years, the state’s Special Investment Regions (SIR) have been less about "investment" and more about "waiting." Blueprints gather dust in humidity-soaked cabinets while legal disputes over land and compensation turn into multi-generational sagas. It’s a mess.

Now, the state has a new plan to fix the bottleneck: importing the neighbors.

Judicial officers from Jharkhand and Odisha are being drafted into the fray. It’s a talent loan, a cross-border judicial draft intended to clear the wreckage of pending cases stalling these industrial zones. The idea is simple. If your own system is clogged with a backlog that reaches back to the 19th century, you borrow some fresh hands to grease the wheels. It’s justice as an assembly line.

Let’s be clear about what an SIR actually is. It’s a cordoned-off dream where the usual rules of red tape are supposed to vanish, replaced by the smooth, friction-less hum of global capital. But in Bengal, the ground is never just ground. It’s history. It’s politics. It’s someone’s ancestral farm that’s been tied up in a Title Suit since the disco era. You can’t build a semiconductor plant or a logistics hub on a plot of land that three different cousins claim to own.

The backlog isn’t just a hurdle; it’s a graveyard. Current estimates suggest that land-related disputes in the region can take anywhere from a decade to "whenever the heat death of the universe occurs" to resolve. Investors don’t have that kind of patience. They have quarterly reports and fickle boards of directors. When a project hits a legal wall in Bengal, the money doesn’t wait. It moves to Vietnam. It moves to Gujarat. It moves anywhere that doesn’t require a decade of litigation to pour a foundation.

Drafting officers from Jharkhand and Odisha is a move of pure desperation. It’s an admission that the local machinery is jammed beyond repair. These officers are being brought in specifically to adjudicate land acquisition disputes, the primary poison killing these projects. The hope is that by isolating these cases and putting them in front of "guest" officers, they can bypass the local bureaucratic sludge.

But there’s a specific friction here that nobody likes to talk about. These aren't just administrative clerks; they’re judicial officers. They’re being asked to "speed up" a process that is, by definition, supposed to be slow and deliberate. Justice isn't supposed to have a "fast forward" button, yet that’s exactly what the state is ordering. When you prioritize "throughput" over the slow grind of the law, things get broken. Usually, it’s the rights of the people who didn’t want to sell their land in the first place.

Then there’s the cost. It isn't just the salaries of these visiting judges. It’s the sheer logistical overhead of setting up dedicated tribunals, the security, the housing, and the inevitable appeals that will follow. You can’t just import a judge and expect the friction to vanish. Every decision made by a "drafted" officer will be scrutinized, challenged, and potentially overturned by higher courts because the losing side will claim the process was rushed. And they’ll probably be right.

We’ve seen this movie before. Special zones, special courts, special rules. It’s a recurring theme in the push for "Ease of Doing Business." We treat the legal system like a software bug that can be patched with a quick update. But the law isn't code. It’s a heavy, physical thing. Bengal’s industrial history is littered with the ghosts of projects like Singur, where the collision between state ambition and local reality ended in a total wreck.

This new plan assumes that the problem is simply a lack of man-hours. It assumes that if we just throw enough judicial bodies at the problem, the SIRs will suddenly sprout factories and warehouses. It’s a mechanical solution to a cultural problem.

The state is betting that by borrowing muscle from Jharkhand and Odisha, they can finally convince the world that Bengal is open for business. They want to show that they can move at the speed of a spreadsheet rather than the speed of a village council. It’s a nice thought. But importing the mechanics doesn’t matter much if the engine itself is rusted solid.

The real question isn't whether these officers can clear the docket. It’s whether anyone will actually like the kind of justice that comes out of a high-speed assembly line. Or if, three years from now, we'll just have a whole new mountain of "accelerated" paperwork to ignore.