As the much-hyped two-day Vibrant Gujarat Global Investors’ Summit kicks off on Friday at the sprawling Science City grounds in Ahmedabad on Friday, the focus area will be the 33 SEZs for which the Gujarat Government expects a lot of investments to flow in. And as it eyes prospective investors from around a dozen countries, it is particularly eyeing Singapore in the infrastructure sector. The summit will have as many as 45 international organisations along with 82 participants from at least a dozen countries, besides representatives of leading corporate houses from Gujarat and other parts of India participating in the biennial meet.Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate the global summit on Friday morning. Singapore Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Balaji Sadasivan is the Guest of Honour, Investment Commission of India’s chairman Ratan Tata is the Chief Guest and ICICI’s MD and CEO K V Kamath will deliver a keynote address at the inaugural ceremony.Seminars on power, oil and gas, chemicals and petro-chemicals, SEZ and port-led development, agro and food processing, engineering, auto and ceramics and biotechnology have been organised at the summit venue. The government expects the investors to ink memoranda of understanding (MoUs) in different sectors during the two-day global event.“At the summit, we expect a good deal of investment from Singapore in the infrastructure sector. Private investors in Singapore are facing space or land constraints in their country, so they prefer to move out and invest in this sector in other countries. And Gujarat having a lot of potential, representatives from Singapore are expected to make investment in this sector”, informed an official in the State Industries department.Sources in the CMO said on Thursday that delegates from the US, China, Japan, Singapore, Italy, South Korea and Israel, apart from top industrial and business honchos from across India, would participate in the summit. The focus area will be the 33 SEZs already been approved by the Centre.Modi said that he expects a huge investment in 26 of the SEZs, which are proposed to be developed by private parties. The biggest SEZs proposed in the State are by the Adani Group at Mundra and Dholera, and by Reliance and Essar at Jamnagar. “The government’s recent decision to permit consumption of liquor in the area of proposed SEZs will help us attract good investment in this focus sector”, explains a senior bureaucrat close to Modi.
