After offering pre-cleared land sites, the Punjab Government has now announced to offer “cheapest power rate” in the country of less than `five per unit to all new investors.
Announcing this, Punjab Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Badal on Friday said that the power rate would not only be cheapest in the country, but also continuous.
“We will be coming out with a policy in this regard shortly after talking it up in the State Cabinet,” he said, while addressing investors at the fourth Western Regional Council meeting of the CII at Pune, during his visit to the city.
Sukhbir also said that there was a huge scope for investors to provide municipal services in 180 towns in the State. “We have decided to tender out all municipal services like road, water, lighting and sewerage to private parties on build, operate and maintain basis for five to 10 year periods,” he said.
He said that the State had already achieved some progress on this front with Trivani being entrusted with maintaining all such facilities in Amritsar. Similarly, Shapoorji Pallonji had been tasked with managing faculties in part of Amritsar.
Following a demand from prospective IT investors, Sukhbir said that besides creation of an IT city in Mohali with Infosys as the anchor unit, the State would offer similar infrastructure in tier-II cities. “We have land banks and pre-cleared sites which are available for taking immediately,” he added.
Deputy Chief Minister said that the State was moving fast as far as clearances were concerned. “Invest Punjab, the nodal office for all investments, is able to give all necessary clearances within an average of 38 days. However, in many cases, we have moved faster. For instance, recently Invest Punjab was able to give all clearances to Kansai Nerolac within 20 days,” he said.
Explaining the concept, Sukhbir said that Invest Punjab had been successful because it had adopted a model of one office, one person, one e-mail and one phone. “We have been able to attract 200 companies with an investment of three billion dollars due to this bold move,” he said.
He said that the incentives offered by Punjab were available to all entrepreneurs investing `one crore and more and not big investors alone.
Earlier, Sukhbir interacted with the representatives of Praj Industries and John Deere. Pramod Chaudhari of Praj said that his company possessed technology to produce ethanol from bio agri waste. To which, Sukhbir said that the government would examine coming out with a policy to encourage this.
John Deere CEO and MD Satish Nadegar discussed ways and means to engage with Punjab.