Confident on Karnataka’s strengths, Bommai welcomes competition from other states to get investments

Karnataka chief minister Basavaraj Bommai said on Wednesday that he wished to see competition from other states for industrial investments.

“We are not wary of competition. Rather it is most welcome for us,” the chief minister said at the inaugural of the three-day global investors meet (GIM) here. No competition would push the state towards complacency, Bommai said.

It was not for nothing that the Niti Ayog had been consistently rating Karnataka as the number one state in innovation. It was not an easy area to do things, but Karnataka was surging ahead with appropriate policies for innovation. It has another policy to promote job creation, too, he said.


His government is preparing Karnataka to become a $1 trillion economy by 2025 and aligning his regime’s goals with those of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to make the country a $5 trillion economy, Bommai said. He expressed the confidence that when the GIM is held in 2025, Karnataka’s GDP would have reached $1 trillion.

Karnataka, he said, had been able to attract Rs 7 lakh crore in investment commitments at the GIM though the event was being held after tough years of Covid-19 pandemic.

Already, Rs 2.80 lakh crore worth investment proposals have been approved and all the proposals which were signed in the meet will be approved in next three months, Bommai said, while adding that since the government was serious on the investments, the investors must also be equally serious.

He said the government would provide the necessary permission and cooperation to make the business proposals become reality.

He said the economic scenario changed post Covid and that Karnataka was fully geared up for development. Karnataka was in the forefront in recovery in economy and it became a leader for change in the country, he said.

Karnataka's progressive thinking policies, ease of doing business, industrial incentive policy, semiconductor policy, EV policy and R&D policy are helping the state to attract investments, he said.

Karnataka’s soil has such power that industrial investments made in the state had only expanded over the years, and no one shut shop, the CM said.

In GST collections, Karnataka stood at No.2 position among the states, and will soon take the top slot, he said.

INVESTOR FRIENDLY POLICIES, SAYS NIRANI

Karnataka’s sector-wise policies like the ESDM Special Incentive package, EV policy and ER&D (engineering research & development) policy provided best-in-class incentives, industries minister Murugesh R Nirani said.

The state had done away with the earlier system of leasing out industrial plots for 99 years and would now allot them on a 10-year lease-cum-sale basis, he said.

The government had roped in private sector players to develop world-class industrial and logistics parks. They will together invest about Rs 15,000 crore to build these facilities, Nirani said.

Governor Thawar Chand Gehlot, union ministers Nirmala Sitaraman, Piyush Goyal, Pralhad Joshi and Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Karnataka ministers Ashwath Narayana and Murgesh Nirani, Mysore Royal family member Pramodadevi Wadiyar, industrialists Sajjan Jindal, Vikram Kirloskar, Rishab Premji, Pratik Agarwal, Rajan Mittal and Karan Adani and chief secretary Vandita Sharma were present at the inaugural event.