With the election fever having subsided, a little-known Patidar outfit — Sardardham Vishwa Patidar Samaj — has come forward to organise a “Global Patidar Business Summit” in Gujarat to network small entrepreneurs from the community with global players, create jobs and improve the skill-set of the community. The summit will be organised between January 5 and January 7, 2018 in Gandhinagar. Gagji Sutariya, president of the four-year-old organisation, said, “We have invited Prime Minister Narendra Modi to inaugurate this summit where 10,000 industrialists from across the world will visit. We are expecting that the PM will confirm in the next one week.” He added that the summit is scheduled to have speakers like Baba Ramdev, Chetan Bhagat, Shiv Khera and BJP MP Hema Malini. “Perhaps this is for the first time that the Patidar Samaj has created a network of 10,000 industrialists. We will interact with them about the problems in the community, the needs of the community, what help can be provided to other backward communities,” Sutariya said. Regarding the need for creating a business summit when a biannual Vibrant Gujarat summit, encompassing the MSME sector as well, is organised by the state, T G Jhalawadia, CEO of Sardardham Vishwa Patidar Kendra, said, “Vibrant Gujarat summit is for bigger players. Here, we are concentrating on the smaller ones. We are offering stalls at just Rs 30,000 which cannot be imagined in Vibrant Gujarat summit.”
