Chief Minister Siddaramaiah’s visit to China has inspired him to take up construction of a state-of-the-art international convention centre near the international airport at Devanahalli at a cost of about Rs. 500 crore.
Announcing this on Monday, Mr. Siddaramaiah said the proposed project would be taken up on a public-private-partnership model. While the government would give land, the private company would make all the investment and build the conventional centre besides providing the necessary infrastructure, he noted.
“I was amazed to see massive conventional centres in China which have been built in just about 10 months. After seeing them, I realised that we hardly have any international standard conventional centres in Bangalore,” he said.
When it was pointed out that the erstwhile BJP government too had called for tenders to build a convention centre near Devanahalli, he pointed out that the BJP dispensation’s proposal had not made any progress as there was only a single response to the tenders called by it to take up the project. “We will carry forward the proposal from here (re-tendering stage). But unlike the earlier proposal, our aim is to build a mega conventional centre,” he said.
Road show
Mr. Siddaramaiah, who led a delegation of 13 industrialists and eight officials to China, said he had held a road show in Shanghai to woo investors. About 150 industrialists from various countries participated in the road show in which a presentation had been made on the investment opportunities in the State as well as the advantages of Karnataka. They had agreed to his request for attending the third edition of the global investors’ meet being held in October 2014 in Bangalore, he said.
