The Uttar Pradesh government has received investment proposals worth Rs 1.2 lakh crore ahead of the Global Investors Summit (GIS) to be held here in February. Against the target of Rs 17 lakh crore fixed by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, the state has achieved 70 per cent of the investment goal four weeks ahead of the big-ticket event in Lucknow from February 10 to 12. While global investment proposals worth Rs 7 Lakh crore were netted during the roadshows in 16 countries, domestic investment proposals worth about Rs 5 lakh crore were garnered when the CM visited Mumbai on January 5 to kick-start the domestic leg of roadshows.
“A galaxy of Indian industrialists and business leaders representing groups such as RIL, Tata Sons, Adani, Godrej, Birla, Piramal, Lodha, Vedanta, Parle, and Hinduja met the CM during his two-day Mumbai visit,” a senior UP government official said.
The CM called upon the domestic industrialists, investors, bankers, and entrepreneurs to invest in UP for realising Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of making India a $5-trillion economy in the next few years.
Since UP is aiming to become a trillion-dollar economy, the GIS is expected to give a major fillip to the endeavour by hard-selling the landlocked state as an ideal investment destination with unlimited potential in key sectors.
The UP government, in a bid to meet its investment target of Rs 17 lakh crore during the Global Investors’ Summit, is also banking on the data centre and electronic manufacturing sector. The government has set the investment target for the IT and electronics sector as Rs 1.6 lakh crore, the highest among the 32 big and small sectors identified for targeted investment.
The sector with the second biggest investment target of Rs 1.2 lakh crore is medium and small-scale enterprises (MSMEs).
The reasons behind increasing the investment target of the IT and electronics sector were threefold: the advantage of the state being close to Delhi, easy availability of skilled workforce; and interests shown in the sector by both national as well as international investors.
During ministerial delegation visits to countries like South Korea, Japan as well as Singapore, officials said companies there were committed to investing in data centres.
A senior official said that during the government delegations’ visits to South Korea and Japan, Samsung and NTT Group, which is working in the telecommunication sector in Japan, also showed interest in opening data centres in Gautam Buddh Nagar.
Recently, the UP government, in its new data centre policy, revised the earlier target of creating 250 MW of storage capacity by 2026 to 900 MW, and promised to fund up to Rs 10 crore for setting up of ‘Centre of Excellence Data Centres’ along with other incentives like easy availability of electricity and other exemptions.
“The biggest roadblock is that these investment proposals in data centres have come for Gautam Buddh Nagar (Noida) while the incentives offered in our policy are for setting up of data centres in other parts of the state,” the official said.