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Focus on investment promotion

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Gone are the days of flamboyant road shows, chic talk and tall claims. It is now the turn of careful planning, focussed targeting and strategic initiatives cutting through the swathe of adverse factors to front-end Kerala’s claim to greater private industrial investment.

An interactive session that Industries Minister Elamaram Karim and Finance Minister T.M. Thomas Isaac had with industrialists, envoys of half-a-dozen countries, including China, Sri Lanka and Malaysia, prominent Malayalis and captains of Central PSUs, was part of the new strategy for industrialisation that the LDF government is trying to put in place to attract greater investment in the State. The LDF regime had begun its journey on the new trajectory of industrial promotion by marrying a few of its ailing public sector units with their robust Central counterparts and using the UPA bonhomie at the Centre to secure firm assurances on more Central investment.

Mr. Karim is pleased with the outcome of the interactive session in Delhi which, he told The Hindu from Delhi on Friday, was in several ways a fruitful exercise.

“We could present our case very well and we got the opportunity to listen to some genuine concerns of investors,” he said, adding that it also brought home to him and the government the need to work hard to change the negative investor perception about the State.

The Industries Minister said he was touched particularly by what Union Commerce Secretary Gopal Krishna Pillai had to say about the much-touted PPP Model. He was of the view that in Kerala, it must be PPPP Model where ‘people’s participation’ would also be added to the public-private partnership concept. “It is a welcome suggestion for, in Kerala, public perception about each and every investment proposal, its environmental impact, persons and corporate groups who come up with these proposals are all important,” he pointed out.

The government, he said, would now focus on removing the major bottlenecks to industrial investment such as procedural delays as pointed out by some of those who had already set up units in the State or had made efforts to do so, improve infrastructure and go in for one-on-one interaction with potential investors.

“The traditional method of making across the board announcement on investment options has proved a failure. Our attempt will be to first identify sectors that have potential for investment and approach individual corporate groups and individuals with specific proposals for investment in our industrial parks,” Mr. Karim said.

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