Chief Minister Edappadi Palanisamy announced in quick succession several fresh investments. This augured well for the second Global Investors’ Meet (GIM). These investments covered a vast range of industries: from a new refinery and petrochemicals project to automobiles, cell phones and glass.
The second GIM is expected to attract much more participation than the earlier one. Leaders from the government presented road shows in global and national cities and several districts of Tamil Nadu. These were led by the Minister of Industry, senior bureaucrats and business leaders. Additional Chief Secretary K Gnanadesikan detailed the special meetings organised with MNCs and described their interest as encouraging.
In Chennai, CII organised special programmes on a range of subjects. Business leaders expressed their appreciation for new policy pronouncements and measures like the single window clearance. The generous incentives offered by the state had attracted a lot of investments, including repeats, ever since liberalisation in the 1990s. Look at the spectacular money spends continued to be made by companies like MRF, Saint Gobain, Feng Tay, Hyundai, Ford Motors…!
Jobs Galore!
For a few months now, IE’s team of senior correspondents visited several projects spread across the state and interviewed leaders in different sectors. We have reported instances of vibrant growth resulting from significant thrust in new technologies.
We were wonderstruck by massive employment in several places: the Taiwanese company, Feng Tay, operating at Cheyyar for over a decade, has set up large manufacturing facilities that employ 23,500. An interesting aspect is that over 18,000 of these are women drawn from the surrounding rural areas paid decent wages! With adequate training and production systems, the company exports the Nike brand of products to the US and Europe. Such substantial employment of women has also been provided by Foxconn, the Taiwanese giant contract manufacturer at Sriperumbudur. Over 15,000, predominantly young women, drawn from the rural parts of Tamil Nadu, assemble around 1200 micro-components for producing cell phones at the rate of three per second!
Tamil Nadu has been unique in its high level of urbanisation. This is exemplified by ten cities of the state selected under the 100 Smart Cities programme. Each one of these has a robust infrastructure. The focus is on a liberal recourse to technology and state-of-the-art IT systems to provide assured supply of energy, water, sanitation, security, communications, and other civic needs. Thus with such strengths, each one of these has the potential to attract investments. This essentially means dispersed development of industry across the state. This facet is not seen even in Maharashtra, the only state ahead of Tamil Nadu in terms of the Gross State Domestic Product. We have presented in this issue detailed description of these cities with their unique attractions and strengths.
Rich infrastructure
In our extensive visits to different parts of Tamil Nadu, we have been struck by the strengths of the state regarding its well-diversified infrastructure. With its long coastline extended over 1000 km, the state has been unique in having four large seaports and several minor ports in between. These, apart from supporting large areas of the hinterland, also offer tremendous scope for private companies to create port facilities on their own.
Not to be forgotten is the fact that Tamil Nadu has four international airports. There are plans to develop several smaller airports at dispersed locations. These would be ideal to spread industrial sites across the entire state. These, over time, could also help build individual hubs by airlines for international operations.
Historically the state has developed a strong highway network. This received a big boost under the National Highway Development Programme post-2000. Four-lane highways are seen in most parts of the state with impressive plans for further expanding on this. Tamil Nadu was one of the earliest states to develop road transport, nationalising bus transport in 1967. Today the state transport corporations operate over 20,000 buses. Add to this a few thousand more buses run by private players offering fast and convenient services to different parts of the state at modest fares. Importantly, in contrast to the dilapidated fleets in several parts of the country, the vehicles operated in Tamil Nadu are much newer.
The railway network in the state had its origin in the late 19th century. Tamil Nadu today has one of the well-knit rail networks. The move towards a uniform gauge has progressed well. General Manager, Southern Railway, R K Kulshrestha, said that the entire stretch would be electrified soon. With rich connectivity to the ports and all urban locations and with impressive plans to attract high rated freight, the railways appear well positioned to service the expanded custom.
Power-full south
Business leader T Kannan, a past chairman of CII (SR), has been passionately advocating industrial development of southern Tamil Nadu. He has now reasons for cheer. The senior bureaucrat, S Krishnan, points to the attractive investments made on the Madurai-Thoothukudi industrial corridor. In recent years Thoothukudi port has emerged a large and profitable major port of the country. The region is already full of power: the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant is already the largest such facility with 2000 MW in operation; two more 1000 MW units are to be added. Kamuthi in Ramanathapuram has the most significant 648 MW solar power facility offering cheap renewable power. Thoothukudi has three large power stations to a capacity of around 3250 MW apart from the number of captive power plants by private industries that account for more than 1000 MW. The coal-based power plant at Uppur adds another 1600 MW. New capacity for 2 x 660 MW coal-based thermal power project has been cleared at Udangudi. Do we see such concentration of power capacity in many other parts of India?
Union Minister of State, Pon. Radhakrishnan promised substantial investment for a satellite port facility at Kanyakumari. With suggestions for upgrading Thoothukudi as an international airport, there appears better prospects for the southern part of Tamil Nadu attracting large investments. TAFE’s Mallika Srinivasan points to their unit at Nilakottai accounting for large exports of tractors and farm equipment from the country. She points to a new technology tie-up with the Japanese tractor giant, ISEKI, for producing a new range of tractors at the Nilakottai plant. The region is all set for a further fillip.
