Highly enthused with the success of its national investors summit organised in Lucknow earlier this year, the government is all set to lure in global investors to the state. Part of this ambitious plan is also to unfold and promote the government’s Hindutva flagship project, Ardh Kumbh Mela, on foreign land, presently slated to be held at Allahabad from January 15 to March 4, 2019. The UP team ensured that they used this project to promote Ardh Kumbh Mela as both tourism and spiritual opportunity, especially to the NRIs.
A high-level government delegation led by Siddharth Nath Singh, State Health Minister visited the US earlier this month. Singh informed the press that some major companies in the health, Information Technology, defence, are ready to invest in Uttar Pradesh in a huge manner. He said that the US is just the beginning; the state government delegation will be planning trips to Europe, Korea and other countries to invite investment in the state.
Happy with the ‘positive feedback’ from the US, Singh said that they were told by the US representatives that “never before Uttar Pradesh was represented in such a planned, structured way.” The minister said that he is confident that Indo-US strategic partnership, with special reference to Uttar Pradesh, is in an expansion mode. Singh said that the representation was able to stress the great hidden potential of UP. He said Uttar Pradesh is the backbone of the country and its progress will have an overall effect on the prosperity of the country and also on the foreign investments.
The minister said that several international companies including Boeing, Lockheed Martin have shown interest to invest in the UP government’s ambitious defence corridor project. The 20,000 crore defence corridor covering 3,000-hectare land will run through Aligarh to Chitrakoot via Kanpur, Lucknow and Jhansi.
He said that the government will also be speaking to the Indian partners like Jet, Tatas and Mahindra. It may be pointed out here that the state government is finalising the UP Defence and Aerospace Manufacturing Policy 2018. In IT sector, they met giants like Oracle, Intel, Sisko who have shown interest in investing in Noida, Uttar Pradesh’s IT city.
Appreciating the US’s focus on ‘preventable’ strategies in the health sector, Singh said that as health minister he is all up for this model and UP will collaborate on JE prevention strategies study with Stanford University.
The minister also talked about low-cost technology developed by Indian diaspora in the US that will be deployed in place of MRI procedure. Initially, this technology will be used in the trauma centre.
The major collaborations are going to be in the Indian aviation industry which is increasing by 15 percent and as many new airports are coming up but there is still no Maintenance and Repair Overhaul (MRO) units for repair of aircrafts in India and aircrafts are being sent to Sri Lanka for this. After this agreement, MRO units will be set up in Meerut in Uttar Pradesh.
The e-marketing giant Amazon which is promoting khadi may soon tie up with the state government to help promote the concept of ‘One District, One Product (ODOP)’ through this. This said the minister will bring nearly five crore artisans on a single global platform.
Another important area of collaboration will be on traffic decongestion. Here the university has shown interest too and public health services.
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