Aim of 3-day festival is to bring NE states to the world: Scindia
Scindia said the ministry is organising a banking summit in Tripura on December 21 to attract investments and in January, it will hold an investment summit for the North East in Delhi.
The minister of development of North Eastern Region (DoNER) and three of the eight chief ministers from the North Eastern states made pitches to attract more investment on the second day of the Ashtalakshmi Mahotsav in New Delhi on Saturday.
The aim of this festival, DoNER minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said, is “to bring the eight states to the world”.
Scindia said the ministry is organising a banking summit in Tripura on December 21 to attract investments and in January, it will hold an investment summit for the North East in Delhi. The idea is to hold roadshows across major Indian cities and cities such as London and Dubai to show how the region is progressing, he said.
“Private sector investment will run parallel to government support,” he said as he lauded the semiconductor ATMP plant that is being set up in Morigaon (Assam) by Tata Semiconductor Assembly and Test Private Limited. “It will change the way the world looks at Assam and the North East,” he said.
“In 2013-14, the tax devolution from the Centre to the eight northeastern states was ₹1,15,000 crore,” Scindia said. “Today, it is ₹5,50,000 crore, that is five times… When we talk about TDS, there was potential of ₹24,000 crore ten years ago. Today, that has increased to ₹1,02,000 crore… North East India will become India’s growth engine,” Scindia said.
Scindia said that the ministry, over the last five months, has created a road map for each of the eight states. “For each state, we have identified their strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities,” he said. He said that tourism in the region has increased 3.5 times and that the ministry has created 2-3 day-long “tourism circuits” for each state. “We are ready to fund it when the state governments give us a detailed plan,” he said.
Sikkim chief minister Prem Singh Tamang said, “If this programme [Ashtalakshmi Mahotsav] is organised annually on fixed days, we can participate with full preparation,” he said.
Meghalaya chief minister Conrad Sangma talked about how his own state was complementing the Centre’s policy by matching the subsidies offered by the state to attract investment.
Sangma said that the state had identified the challenges unique to it and come out with an action plan that works. For instance, in Meghalaya, geographical location and accessibility to the hills is a challenge as is the land tenure system, he said.
“We don’t have land available for economic growth because only the local tribes out there can own the land. It is an act that our leaders have brought in a long time back,” he said. “We have not had the kind of inflow of commercial activities that would have been there if the Land Transfer Act was not there,” he said.
“It is the right thing we did because we protected our land, we protected our people. That is the identity we have had but now we will build on this and get a mix of how we can balance between our traditions, the laws that we have, the constraints we have and figure out the opportunities there are,” he said.
As a result, sectors like agriculture, food processing, tourism, IT are ideally suited for Meghalaya, Sangma said, as he called on the private sector to come and build a network of food supply chain with cold storage options and transportation from remote parts of the state.
Sangma explained that to begin development, given the extensive community the state has through a network of headmen from across 7,000 villages, Meghalaya could mix community participation with development. “We have laid the foundation for a ₹200 crore cable car going from Shillong to Shillong Peak,” he said. There, he explained, the land is the community’s and in this “community PPP” model, the profits go to the community.
The issues in neighbouring Bangladesh were briefly discussed. Tripura chief minister Manik Saha said that Tripura’s airport is soon going to be declared an international airport. “It was decided from here that the first flight would go to Chittagong [Bangladesh] but you are all aware of the situation in Bangladesh right now which is why it can not happen,” he said.
“We already have a road connecting to Chittagong and it was to become the gateway to South East Asia. That has been halted. A train was also supposed to reach Calcutta [Kolkata] via Bangladesh, that has also been halted,” Saha said.
Sangma also called for greater cooperation and coordination within the region so that it can engage with SE Asia and Bangladesh. “There is a strong need for Mizoram, Tripura, Meghalaya and Assam to talk to Bangladesh together. There is a very important need for Assam and Arunachal to talk to Bhutan together. It is very important for that to happen because that is how we will be able to present a larger market, a larger production area,” he said.