nEdappadi Palaniswamy, Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, who recently created a sensation with his fortnight long tour to UK, USA and West Asian countries to woo investors to the State has been thrown a sporting challenge by a senior Congress leader.
The latter has asked the Chief Minister to come out with details of the AIADMK Government’s achievements over the last eight years in opening industries and creating jobs.
The Chief Minister signed 41 Memorandums of Understanding with various industrial groups and entrepreneurs during his visit to the above mentioned countries. The AIADMK Government held two Global Investors Meets (GIM) at Chennai in 2015 and 2017 which it had claimed as path breaking initiatives.
M K Stalin, leader of the opposition, who also is the head of the DMK, has been demanding a White Paper on the Chief Minister’s foreign tour and has been terming the whole exercise a waste. “The State is undergoing unprecedented unemployment and closure of industrial units as a fall out of the wrong economic policies followed by the Centre,” the DMK chief had charged.
But C D Meyyappan, senior Congress leader went one step ahead and asked the AIADMK Government to furnish the entire details like number of industries set up house in the State as well as the details regarding the numbeer of employees hired by them
“Let the Chief Minister come out with details of the companies/ventures which were set up in the State as part of the GIMs. We would also like to know the number of persons employed in these companies and the districts from where they have been hired,” said Meyyappan, former president of the Youth Congress who himself is an industrialist.
Meyyappan said the first GIM was held in 2015 and it is almost four years since the MOUs were signed between the State and the participants. “The AIADMK Government had claimed that all applications for setting up industries in the State would be cleared through a single window system and entrepreneurs would get all approvals and licenses within weeks. Now is the time for the AIADMK Government to tell the world about the number of industries set up in the State by industrial groups which participated in the 2015 GIM,” said Meyyapan.
The first ever GIM held in 2015 under the patronage of the then Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa was described as a resounding success by Jayalalithaa herself. She had declared on the concluding day of the event that the total investment of Rs 2,42,160 crore realized in the GIM surpassed the cumulative investment made in Tamil Nadu during the two decades from 1991 to 2011.
“Out of the total investment realized in the GIM, Rs 1,0,4286 crore is in the manufacturing sector. More than 50 per cent of this is being invested in the southern districts which are economically as well as industrially backward,” Jayalalithaa had said.
The government had also claimed that that Rs 2,42,160 crore investment for which the MoUs were signed in the 2015 GIM would generate 1,80,000 new jobs. “In this era of instant communication and internet, it is not a difficult job for the Government to come out with the statistics and data about the number of companies functioning in the State. Let them tell us the number of people employed in these industries and the districts from which they have been hired,” said Meyyappan.