Odisha is no more an ace sprinter in industrial investment race as it keeps losing the lead over the years. From the ace position in 2013, Odisha slipped to 4th in 2014, 5th in 2015 and 6th in the first three months (January-March) of 2016. Chandrababu Naidu-led Andhra Pradesh is giving Odisha a good chase now as Andhra Pradesh outdid Odisha for the 5th place nationally in 2016.
The outcome on citizens then is obvious as from a high of 2 lakh promised jobs in 2013 for over a million of unemployed youths in the State; it now has trickled down to a mere around 50, 000 jobs in 2015.
With a proposed industrial investments worth Rs 24,524 crore, Odisha had finished 5th in 2015, down from 4th with investments to the tune of Rs 28,219 crore in 2014. And, in January-March 2016, the State with Rs 1,322 crore worth proposals was edged out by Andhra Pradesh from the coveted top-5 as revealed by the private industrial investment inflow data with the Industry Ministry.
As the State government is obsessed with big headline numbers, the shocker is when in 2015 Odisha could see materialisation of a mere 2 per cent of the proposed investments, Andhra Pradesh romped home with an actual materialisation of a whopping 21 per cent of its total proposed investments in 2015. Overall, Odisha languished poorly at the 15th slot nationally in the actual implementation rate.
The negative fallout on Odisha: from proposed generation of around 50,000 jobs in 2015, the actual realisation was a mere 1,100 jobs.
An analysis brings to fore how a poor implementation rate proves a dampener in industrial investment inflow to a State. For instance, Chhattisgarh, which topped the country in 2014 with over Rs 1.62 lakh crore investments, recorded an actual implementation rate of zero per cent. The result: new proposals in 2015 shrunk by a whopping one-fifth.
On the contrary, Gujarat which finished 3rd with a mere Rs 39,597 crore investment inflow and an actual implementation rate of 100 per cent with investments totalling to over Rs 40,000 crore in 2014 saw the fresh proposals nearly doubled in 2015. And Andhra Pradesh with a good implementation rate in 2015 is witnessing a rise in fresh investment inflow in 2016, data suggest.
Moreover, the analysis further suggests that the investment inflow in the metallurgical sector, Odisha’s mainstay industry, is on the wane. Data reveal its dwindling share nationally in the inflow chart with its share sliding to mere a 2 per cent in 2016 from over 6 per cent in 2014. On the contrary, the electrical equipments sector upped its share in the inflow chart to a whopping 27 per cent in 2016 from a mere 8 per cent in 2014. Even, the inflow share to the food processing sector is up at 9.4 per cent of the total inflow nationally from a mere 2.5 per cent in 2014.