Kolkata: West Bengal has received investment proposals worth ₹4.4 lakh crore during the 8th Bengal Global Business Summit (BGBS), West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee said on Thursday.
Addressing the concluding session of the two-day flagship industrial summit at New Town in Kolkata, Banerjee said, “We have received investment proposals worth ₹4,40,595 crore during the 8th BGBS. I am extremely happy.”
Speaking on the success of the summit, Banerjee said, “More than 5,000 investors and delegates attended the summit. We have seen 212 memoranda of understanding (MoUs) and letters of intent, covering multiple sectors during the summit. Many are in the process of tie-ups. At least 16 secretarial meetings were held.”
The inaugural session of the summit was attended by Hemant Soren, chief minister of Jharkhand, and top business leaders like Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) , Sanjiv Puri, chairman and managing director of ITC Limited, Sajjan Jindal, chairman of JSW Group, and Sanjiv Goenka, chairman of the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group.
Banerjee added that the “ ₹4.4 lakh crore in investment proposals” received by the state is in addition to the proposals made by top industrialists such as Ambani and Jindal on the first day. “On the first day of the summit, the big captains of the industries assured us of some big projects. After the inaugural session on Wednesday, I personally met Mukesh Ambani and Sajjan Jindal,” she said.
Ambani announced that RIL would double its investments in West Bengal from the current ₹50,000 crore by the end of the decade. “In 2016, when I first attended this summit, RIL’s investment stood below ₹2,000 crore. In less than a decade, our investment increased 20 times, and today our investment in the state is more than ₹50,000 crore. We shall double this investment by the end of this decade,” Ambani said on Wednesday.
Jindal expressed interest in redeveloping the Andal airport, the state’s only greenfield airport, in partnership with the Bengal government and Singapore’s Changi Airport.
“The Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited’s (ONGC) oil exploration at Ashok Nagar in North 24 Parganas is one of the important investment projects. We have allotted them 15 acres of land at ₹1. ONGC will be commercially exploring oil and natural gas. We will give them a petroleum mining lease,” Banerjee said, adding this will bring West Bengal into the petroleum map of India.
To be sure, not all investment proposals or MoUs signed by governments translate into real projects.
