Shreekant Somany, the newly elected chairman of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) Northern Region (NR), said that the Centre should focus on early implementation of policies, projects and reforms like GST, land and labour, remove various procedural and other bottlenecks to enhance ease of doing business, which was a key to attract both domestic and foreign investments in the northern region.
He said this while addressing his maiden Press conference to unveil the new theme of CII NR on Saturday. “CII believes that various new initiatives like Make in India, Digital India, Skilled India, Clean Ganga, Swachchh Bharat, Jan Dhan Yojana, plan for Smart Cities, ease of doing business etc can turn out to be real game changer, if implemented well,” he stressed. “Further, it is also imperative to fast-track the stalled infrastructure and manufacturing projects along with key Industrial and freight corridors like AKIC, DMIC, western and eastern corridors in order to provide the much-needed fillip to growth in north”, he added.
“Against this backdrop, we at CII Northern Region have adopted ‘Build India, Build North: Invest in Development as the theme for the year 2015-16. CII’s endeavours would primarily focus on facilitating investments, enhancing ease of doing business, promoting Make in North, ensuring peaceful industrial relations, enhancing MSMEs competitiveness, supporting agriculture, strengthening Infrastructure (both social and industrial) and societal initiatives, including focus on Affirmative Action, Sanitation in Schools, CSR, Women Empowerment and the like,” informed the new chairman of CII NR.
“Skill development, good governance and inclusivity will continue to remain as the focus of CII’s regional work”, he added. “CII would draw and implement a sustainable growth model for the northern region, which, on one hand, is seeing an unprecedented scale of urbanisation and, on the other, has a strong agriculture-based economy,” further informed Somany.
CII would exhaustively support the Government to attain success in its Make in India campaign of the Prime Minister, which is possible only with active support and participation of all the stakeholders, including the CII, he said, adding that Invest North 2015 and State Investors’ Summits such as Resurgent Rajasthan, Progressive Punjab and Emerging Himachal are certain initiatives that would be organised during the year.