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In less than a month of forming the government in Punjab, chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh is hard-selling “destination Punjab” to top industry honchos, a la former deputy CM Sukhbir Badal.
Interestingly, Amarinder, who has more than once mocked the claims of Sukhbir of making Punjab power surplus, sold Punjab as the “only power surplus state in the country with abundance of cheap power for industrial units” .
He ensured to supply power at Rs 5 per unit to the industry, as promised in the Congress manifesto.
Sukhbir too had visited industry captains in Mumbai, Bengaluru and New Delhi twice in his government’s second term and held two “Progressive Punjab Summits” to boost investment in the state. The name of Congress government’s initiative has, however, changed to “Invest Punjab”.
On the first day of his threeday Mumbai trip to woo investors, Amarinder had one-to-one meetings with Tata Sons chairman Natarajan Chandrasekaran, ICICI Bank CEO and MD Chanda Kochhar, Goldman Sachs chairman Sonjoy Chatterjee and Godrej group chairman Adi Godrej.
According to a press statement, Amarinder got an assurance from Chandrasekaran to visit the state soon to explore the possibility of setting up a major venture. He requested Kochhar to consider the possibility of shifting the bank’s backend operations to Mohali in the next stage of their expansion.
Finance minister Manpreet Singh Badal, who is part of the chief minister’s delegation, urged ICICI Bank to consider developing 200 model dairy farms in the state exclusively for breeding purposes.
The two sides agreed to develop Mehraj as a digital village as part of the “ICICI Digital Villages” initiative, through which the bank plans to transform 100 villages across the country into digital villages.
Kochhar also promised to consider re-skilling and financing to partner the state government in the establishment of such centres for youth and farmers, with experts called in from various fields to take the process forward. Kochhar said the bank would soon make a presentation to the CM in Chandigarh on the National Agriculture Market (NAM) online trading portal for farm produce launched last year by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Adi Godrej told him about the various ongoing Godrej projects in Punjab, including the Godrej Tyson cold storage project at Ludhiana, which was signed as part of a 2015 MoU with Punjab.
The evening concluded with a dinner meeting with KPMG India chairman and CEO Arun K Kumar.
