The City of Destiny is being spruced up for the 22{+n}{+d}edition of the CII Partnership Summit being hosted at Harbour Park in Visakhapatnam from January 10 to 12 to showcase investment potential of Navya Andhra Pradesh with Sunrise State as the USP.
Hectic preparatory works are under way at the vacant site of the APIIC at Harbour Park – the venue of the summit. AC hangars are being installed with wooden flooring, adequate car parking, separate lounges for the Chief Minister and the VVIPs. It will have bio-toilets too.
This is the first major investors’ meet Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu will face on home ground post bifurcation.
Incidentally, all rooms in most of the star hotels and guesthouses in the city are blocked by the district authorities to accommodate 1,000 to 1,200 delegates, 40 per cent of them from abroad.
Initially, the idea of engaging a cruise liner was explored, but due to heavy cost involved, it was dropped, a CII office-bearer said.
Declining to comment on the volume of investments the summit would attract, Director of Industries Kartikeya Misra told The Hindu that Andhra Pradesh had decided to partner with the CII to hard sell investment opportunities of not only Visakhapatnam and Vijayawada-Guntur capital region but also all parts of the State with a 974-km coastline.
‘Grounding quotient’
Nearly 150 MoUs in IT, electronics, telecom, education, tourism, hospitality, health care, and other fields will be signed.
To a pointed question on the bitter experience of failure to ground several projects for which MoUs were signed at earlier summits, Mr. Misra pointed out that this time they had taken into consideration ‘grounding quotient’ of the project proponents.
The key highlights of the 22{+n}{+d}edition of the summit will be discussions on shared and sustainable economy, Sunrise Andhra, multilateralism vs. regionalism, future of global trade, ‘Make in India’ and drafting India’s global manufacturing strategy, global financial architecture and financing for growth and stability, changing world of work and sustainability, energy conservation, and emission compliance.
CEOs Adi Godrej, Noel Tata, Kishore Biyani, Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant will address various sessions.
Besides seven to eight plenary sessions dedicated to various current topics, it will also have break-out deliberations with focus on B2B meetings and networking.
With a few days left for the summit, officials are leaving no stone unturned to make it a mega event – a month before the city hosts International Fleet Review – which will see participation of over 70 foreign navies and presence of President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
