The Hindu : Chasing investments - while rooted in reality

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Jan 20, 2003

Business

Business

Chasing investments - while rooted in reality

By Anand Parthasarathy

Kochi Jan. 19. Stunning scenery is great - but it doesn't put food in the mouths and cash in the pockets of lakhs of deprived citizens. Amidst the high-pressure hype surrounding the ongoing Global Investor Meet (GIM), the Kerala Government agencies are acutely aware that `selling the State' as an investment opportunity is only half the job. Selling the concept of massive outside investment to her intensely aware people is no cakewalk either.

Which is why many of the infrastructure development schemes being showcased here are different from the general run of such projects seen in India. When the Kerala Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation (KINFRA) decided to create an International Apparel Park near the coastal belt of Kazhakuttam near the State capital Thiruvananthapuram, critics said they had a death wish: the area had the reputation of being a rough neighbourhood fuelled by chronic unemployment among the local artisan fisher people.

After almost three years, KINFRA persuaded the first entrepreneur to set up a unit here: the Mumbai-based Leela Group, better known for its flagship Leela Hotel. Today at the GIM, Vivek Nair, Leela's Managing Director announced on behalf of the group that it would be doubling the number of garment manufacturing units to six.

The menfolk of Kazhakuttam were skilled at catching fish - but the women have turned out to be adept at stitching clothes. Unemployment is a thing of the past because every home has at least one earning member. N. Sasidharan Nair, Managing Director of the International Apparel Parks, says hundreds of women from the more backward districts such as Idukki are streaming to Kazhakuttam attracted by the job opportunities - - which has persuaded KINFRA to replicate the park on their own doorsteps as soon as land can be acquired.

"We learnt our lessons," KINFRA's Managing Director, G.C. Gopala Pillai, told The Hindu today, "We are not in business unless our projects, however commercially savvy, fit into the social fabric of Malayalis - and gain their approval." Which is why there is strong local support from the hill folk of Vayittiri in Malabar's Wayanad district to the idea of a Herbal Village in their midst.

The area is particularly rich in herbs and medicinal plants— over 100 of them can be readily processed — and KINFRA hopes to create a 500 acre park where surrounding villagers would have a stake in growing the required plants and selling the produce to processing industries located at nearby towns such as Kalpetta or Kozhikode. "It will be Kerala's version of the Anand milk model," Dr. Pillai feels Kerala's reputation for meaningful Cinema is another native talent that KINFRA hopes to leverage.

In less than a year, the Film and Video Park on the outskirts of Thiruvananthapuram has seen a major player - Prasad Laboratories, set up shop here and post-process 39 films - almost the entire output of the Malayalam film industry. Interestingly, the industry's top stars are also shrewd business people willing to stake their money in the State's future as preferred destination for screen content development. Matinee idol Suresh Gopi has created a logistics facility, Mohanlal has set up a state-of-the-art sound studio and Mammootty has started work on a digital post-production unit — all within the Film Park.

"Now we would like to complement these facilities with an international-level School of Visual Media," said A.S. Suresh Babu, Managing Director of the KINFRA Film and Video Park.

Three globally known schools have expressed interest and their proposals are being discussed at the GIM which concludes today. KINFRA will be a decade old in February— and about 60 percent of the real estate it has acquired has already been taken.

"We live for the day when we would have set up industries in all the land entrusted to us — then we can dissolve ourselves and go home because our work will have been done", Dr. Pillai said.

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