Mumbai: Yogi Adityanath, chief minister of the country’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, interacted with the business and Bollywood communities Wednesday, in a bid to attract investment to his state.
Adityanath met a host of corporate leaders from India Inc. in Mumbai, including Tata Sons chairman N. Chandrasekaran, engineering major L&T’s MD & CEO S.N. Subrahmanyan, private equity firm KKR’s Sanjay Nayar and Bharat Forge’s Baba Kalyani.
Among Bollywood personalities, Yogi met actor Akshay Kumar, as well as filmmakers Boney Kapoor, Anand Pandit, Manmohan Shetty and Subhash Ghai. The CM also allayed concerns raised by Maharashtra leaders about a new film city coming up in the NCR region, which includes parts of UP.
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Ease of doing business in UP
According to a statement issued by the UP government, the business community leaders who met Yogi acknowledged the ‘Herculean’ effort that the state has undertaken to jump up to the second spot on ‘ease of doing business’ parameters.
“They also congratulated the CM for making the state the most preferred investment destination,” the statement said.
The UP government claimed the zero tolerance policy of the state government towards crime has largely transformed the law & order situation. It also it has implemented a record 186 reforms, spread across multiple areas such as labour regulations, inspection regulations, land allotment, property registration, environment clearances, which have contributed to the ease of doing business.
The state also boasted of ‘world class’ infrastructure with many expressways in the works, such as the 341-km Poorvanchal Expressway connecting Lucknow to Ghazipur, the 290-km Bundelkhand Expressway connecting Chitrakoot to the Agra-Lucknow Expressway, and a 600-km Ganga Expressway touted as Asia’s longest. UP is also coming up with an international airport at Jewar in Greater Noida, near Delhi.
Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, seven projects worth around Rs 8,500 crore have commenced commercial operations, while 19 projects worth Rs 6,400 crore — including major investments from Reliance Jio, the Adani Group, Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and PepsiCo — were said have entered the active implementation stage.
The state government is also planning a defence industrial corridor over 5,000 hectares of land, of which 3,796 hectares have been identified. About 1,321.92 hectares have already been acquired, including 1,122 hectares in Jhansi and Chitrakoot alone.
Lucknow municipal bonds on BSE
Earlier in the day, CM Yogi was at the Bombay Stock Exchange for the listing of the Lucknow Municipal Corporation’s bonds. The municipal corporation raised Rs 200 crore through municipal bonds on a private placement basis last month. The coupon rate of the taxable bond was fixed at 8.5 per cent per annum.
The proceeds from the bonds will be used for infrastructure projects in Lucknow. The merchant bankers to the bond issue were A.K. Capital Services Ltd and HDFC Bank Ltd.
Terming the listing a historic moment, Yogi Adityanath said other cities, including Ghaziabad, Agra, Kanpur, Prayagraj and Varanasi, will be using this route for raising resources.
“It is a matter of pride for UP that the Lucknow Municipal Corporation has raised Rs 200 crore through its bond issue which got listed on BSE today,” he said.
“The trust of the investors which UP has earned during the last three and a half years will augment our effort to improve infrastructure in urban areas. It shows the improvement in the industrial climate of the state and the trust the investors have reposed in the state machinery,” Yogi added.
‘Our film city isn’t snatching Mumbai’s business’
CM Yogi also allayed concerns raised by Maharashtra CM Uddhav Thackeray and his Shiv Sena colleague Sanjay Raut about taking away the movie business from Mumbai and Maharashtra with a film city adjacent to Delhi.
“We are creating something new. Why are you getting concerned? We are giving new world-class infrastructure to all. Hence, everybody will have to grow up, widen their thinking and better facilities will have to be given. One who is able to do that will get the people,” he said.
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Earlier, the BJP media were portraying Bollywood as a den of drug mafia.
Now, the same people are ‘bonding’ with Bollywood to attract business to UP !
Nothing is going to materialse. The Yogi is a typical Hindu dacoit from UP.
In Modi 1, the BJP did show biz to launch ‘Make in India’. It brought in Bollywood and invited some foreign businessmen (mostly foreign Hindus) to India. At the first show, the stage caught fire – a good demo of ‘Make in India’. The foreign businessmen who attended said it was just an inexplicable show of nationalism and entertainment – there was no business.
It will be the same now The BJP will periodically announce various initiatives and make a show, and some Hindus will be taken in, and then the BJP will move on to their next project. But the basic attraction is Hindu comminalism against Muslims, and the rest is a distraction.
There is no major FDI coming to India. Modi himself said in a speech in the UK that India’s top sources of FDI are Mauritius and Singapore – that is, Indian black money. There is some investment from the likes of Facebook and Amazon but it is service for selling in India. There is no manufacturing.
The case for manufacturing in UP is even more of hopeless. You cannot have high manufacturing in India due to poorly educated work force with no R and D culture. As for lower tech like garments, UP is land locked and the transport to ports makes it non-competitive with Bangladesh. The only thing UP can have is a cow economy, and related jobs – gomutra medicines and cow vigilantes. Even leather industries in UP had to move to Bangladesh due to the terrorism of Hindu cow vigilantes. Yogi has encouraged these.
This Yogi fancies himself as a Vivekananda. Some months back he announced that he is going to make UP a world industrial hub and he was going to get droves of MNCs leaving China to come to UP. No one came. Earlier, he boasted he was going to make big business in UP with religious tourism.
This man had criminal cases, he had them cancelled when he became CM. We know his incompetence in his constituency, Gorakhpur where children died of encephalitis and the best he could do was put the doctor who saved some children behind bars (because he was Muslim).
The fact is UP does not have the skills for high tech industry due to its illiterate and uneducated population (that is why they get Yogi). Even for low tech industry for export, UP will not be competitive, because it is inland and infrastructure for export is too far away. So it cannot emulate Bangladesh. UP will have to continue with gomutra and temple economy. Don’t waste your time, even less money, on investing in UP.
Yogi is another pervert Hindu bachelor who said he wanted to dig up Muslim graves to rape their women. He venerates cows but thinks nothing about humans.
Hindus elect their dacoits and expect development. Akshay Kumar and such Hindus go and touch their feet.
Wow so how did he recently just secured 7000 crore worth of investment in the state
Do you expect a cm to do some sort of magic that within years all problems will disappear any good cm will at least need a decade to make a difference not just three years
All locals I interacted with from middle class to drivers have said government services under yogi have increased
Development in my native city have also become sky-high recently many new shopping centers
Apartments
Local houses
And proper real estate colonies have come up within few years
Road condition is a lot better etc rtc