Vibrant Summit: Centre to steal the show from state

Union finance minister Arun Jaitley, who will be here throughout the summit, will also attend the global CEOs conference to be held at the Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya on the evening of January 11. Before this, he will give the key address at a special seminar organised the same day on “CSR: Touching Lives and Making Impact.” The other key Cabinet ministers are  J P Nadda (health), Kalraj Mishra (MSME) and  Piyush Goyal (Energy),  as the Gujarat ministers will take a back seat. Only two of the total 10 seminars lined up during the two days will solely focus on Gujarat.

“While various seminars are being organised by the different departments of Gujarat Government, the key speakers here are the Union Ministers,” said a top-level official with Industry Department, which is organiser of the event.

For the first time, the  summit, conceived by Modi in 2003 as then Gujarat chief minister, will have Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as a topic of discussion. Besides, there will be international conclave of city leaders under “Smart Cities for Next Generations”. As Gujarat gears up to have two smart cities – GIFT and Dholera – Union Ministers for Urban Development and Housing Venkaiah Naidu and Mogens Jensen, Minister for Trade and Development, Denmark, will be the key speakers.

In another first, the VGGIS will have seminar dedicated to future investments in India titled “Invest India Summit: Financing the Future Growth”. Jaitley and top officials of Ministry of Finance will be the key speakers.

“The summit so far has only discussed investments Union and trade options for Gujarat. This is for the first time the future of India will be discussed from the platform of Gujarat; that too by the central ministers and officials,” pointed a senior official here.

Similarly, Union Minister of agriculture and food processing Harsimrat Kaur will be the key speaker at a session titled “Innovation and Technology in Food Processing for Sustaining Food Security”. Union Health Minister J P Nadda will preside over “Health for All: Leveraging Technology, Innovation and Enablers”. Union Minister of State for Power, Coal and New and Renewable Energy Piyush Goyal will be key speaker at a seminar on “Sustainable Energy for All”.

Only one session, titled “Small and Medium Enterprises: Gearing up for Global Competitiveness”, will see CM Anandiben Patel and Finance Minister Saurabh Patel as key speakers. But here, too, the lead will be taken by Union MSME Minister Kalraj Mishra. The second seminar with the whole focus on the state will be titled “Gujarat: Preferred Hub for Defence Production”. G Mohan Kumar, secretary Defence Production, will be the key speaker.