‘GIM about relationships, govt focused on follow-up’

‘GIM about relationships, govt focused on follow-up’

Tamil Nadu government will follow a multi-pronged strategy to track and ensure ground-level implementation of `6.64 lakh crore worth of investment proposals announced at the just-concluded Global Investors Meet in Chennai, according to industries secretary V Arun Roy.

“The chief minister has announced a committee headed by the industries minister to follow up on the GIM MoUs,” he told TOI. This committee will, first, “oversee a database of progress of each project and keep track of investment and employment”. Second, it will “see if the necessary clearances for the investment are issued within the prescribed limits of the Business Facilitation Act”. And finally, it will “identify cases where interdepartmental issues are involved and serve as a forum to iron out those issues.”

The hand-holding may also include help with land acquisition. But “it will be a case-to-case decision” and so “can’t be guaranteed because the interests of other stakeholders such as the landowner also have to be considered”, he says.

The focus on implementation will also be helpful for investments lined up by the MSME sector. “The MoUs now offer us the database to work with. We will encourage them to apply for single window clearance and then monitor when the work commences,” says Roy. “Some will start after a few months because they have not yet acquired land. Some have already purchased land so will start immediately,” he adds.

And while some MSME bodies complained about Chennai-centric investments, the GIM proposals have been quite dispersed regionally. “More than Rs 1 lakh crore worth of investments went to south Tamil Nadu and another `90,000 crore went to west Tamil Nadu,” says Roy. In electronics, that criticism may be somewhat true but even there a “big chunk has gone to west TN in terms of the Tata Electronics project. Others like TVS have announced expansions in the Hosur area”, he says.

Krishnagiri in the west and Tuticorin in the south will be the “hubs that will boom” thanks to green hydrogen and EV. “What really surprised us was the amount of interest in green hydrogen centred around Tuticorin,” says Roy. “Everyone wants to use Tuticorin port to evacuate green hydrogen to southeast Asia. Also, land is cheaper there. From our side, we’re getting land and the desalination plant ready for these projects,” he adds. Even EV project VinFast has chosen Tuticorin because “they are primarily focussed on the export market and want to use Tuticorin port,” he says.

The GIM lineup though was more or less along expected lines. “All the proposals that came in, we knew they were happening because we had been working on most of these proposals for around six months,” says Roy. The only surprise was VinFast, which was a fairly late entrant. It was also expected that the heavy lifting in terms of investments would come from renewable energy, electronics, automotives and electric vehicles. “The newer sectors that the state government is looking to promote will take time to take off,” says Roy.

In the end though the big takeaway of GIM has been the relationships built between state government and industry. “The Tamil Nadu government has been reaching out (to captains of industry at home and abroad) on a personal level,” says Roy. “The industries minister, for instance, went to Vietnam in the last week of December to close the VinFast deal.” Human decisions, including economic ones, are based on relationships. “The purpose of GIM is to build relations, to talk, debate and figure out common ground. Relationship building is at the heart of any investor meet, be it Davos or GIM, so it is critical,” he says.

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