: For a State just taking its first baby steps putting behind the loss of Hyderabad, unfair bifurcation and a deficit budget, hosting a big ticket investment-attracting event like CII Partnership Summit requires lot of nerve. Yet vintage Chief Minister, N. Chandababu Naidu showed he still has loads of it and pulled off a coup of sorts by assembling the captains of industry in Visakhapatnam and wheedling them into signing “331 MoUs involving investment of Rs. 4 lakh crore having the potential to create employment for 10 lakh people.”
Reminiscent of the way he doggedly pursued Bill Gates to locate Microsoft, its first development centre outside Redmond in the US or the Ambanis to have ISB, both in Hyderabad, Mr. Naidu showed his resolve in branding and promoting “Sunrise Andhra Pradesh” as the best investment destination. The basket of MoUs signed encompassed all sectors, Rs. 1.54 lakh crore in energy, Rs. 43,000 crore in housing, Rs. 40 000 crore in infrastructure, Rs. 6,455 cr ore in mining and Rs. 3,168 crore in IT.
Among the companies public sector RINL plant in Vizag took the cake with Rs.38,500 crore for modernisation and expansion, Reliance Group’s Rs. 5,000 crore for naval shipbuilding facility again near Vizag, Rs. 7,500 crore by Hudco in the capital Amaravati, Rs. 8,500 crore by Jasan Infra and Rs, 33,000 crore by Consortium of Construction Companies of China.The list of MoUs looks impressive and if such summits are all about showcasing the State’s potential and policies, Mr. Naidu exploited it to the hilt pledging to clear investment proposals within 21 days and listing out how the State had a land bank of 7 lakh acres, ensured round-the-clock power supply, abundant water and a long 974-km-long coastline waiting to be tapped. He offered virtually everything on a platter to the investor.
Mr. Naidu said the response from the investors was overwhelming. Enthused, he declared that the next summit would also be in Vizag.
“AP has achieved a growth rate of 11 per cent and is poised to reach 14 to 15 per cent mark. The World Bank has ranked AP second in ease of doing business. Our vision is to make AP rank among the top three States by 2022 and top economy with highest happiness index by 2029….”, he added. Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley shared his optimism when he said with an expected growth rate of 14 per cent AP would soon become ideal destination for investors and praised Mr. Naidu for his visionary leadership.
Paeans over a successful edition apart and notwithstanding the all-pervasive optimism, Mr. Naidu would have to prove the sceptics wrong. This scepticism is not without reason. May it be Vibrant Gujarat, Lead West Bengal or Advantage Karnataka, all similar summits, the strike rate has been rather poor. There is a yawning gap between the signing of MoUs and the actual grounding of the projects. In the case of Vibrant Gujarat, MoUs inked for over Rs. 20-lakh-crore investment only about 10 per cent of projects have fructified.
The Congress there has put it at seven per cent. In West Bengal and in Karnataka, the conversion rate was much less, hovering around 7 per cent.
The undivided AP’s track record too was no different. The previous three such “successful summits” held during Mr. Naidu’s tenure till 2004, the strike rate was put at 6.5 per cent.
The rate would have surely plummeted further for the last CII partnership summit in the undivided State in Hyderabad in 2012, when the Kiran Kumar Reddy Government signed 243 MoUs with investment plans for Rs. 6.47 lakh crore though no one even tried to estimate with the State plunging into bifurcation crisis.
The 2012 summit was criticised on other grounds like inclusion of Rs. 1.25 lakh-crore plans of public sector units, expansion proposal of RINL plant in Vizag, old agreements and those pertaining to even electricity sub stations apparently just to boost the investment figures.
No surprise, the Opposition YSR Congress has demanded a white paper on the signing of MoUs while Congress leaders ridiculed Mr. Naidu’s claims of growth rate and wondered how would anybody invest when work on capital city is yet to take off. How can he get investments when he has failed to make the Centre honour its promises on Special Category Status and more incentives to industry. They want him to avoid going on “sign MoUs spree” and focus on “deliverables” like single window clearance, land without litigations, evolve online payment of taxes, deadline- driven building permission as also supply of power and water.
