Ahmedabad: The Centre is leaving no stone unturned to make the biennial Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit a success. The five-day event is scheduled to kick off at Mahatma Mandir in Gandhinagar. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it is learnt, is personally monitoring arrangements for the summit. This apart, several departments of the Centre are working in tandem with officials from Gujarat for the event.

“Government of India is strongly involved. The Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion is guiding and helping us. The Ministry of External Affairs is helping us with political and business delegations. The Department of Biotechnology is helping in arranging the first Nobel Laureate summit in the country,” Chief Secretary J N Singh said.

Besides the Prime Minister, 11 Union ministers are expected to attend the event. These include Manohar Parrikar, M Venkaiah Naidu, Piyush Goyal, Nitin Gadkari, Dr Harsh Vardhan, Nirmala Sitharaman and Smriti Irani. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will lead a discussion on the GST and RBI Governor Urjit Patel will speak about the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, one of Modi’s pet projects when he was Gujarat CM.

Five BJP-ruled states — Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Haryana — will also participate in the event and seek investments, said additional Chief Secretary (industries and mines) P K Taneja.

This year, India’s top 10 FDI contributors are joining the event as “partner countries” and will be sending political and business delegations. In all, as many as 12 countries will be “partner countries” to the event.

The Prime Minister will be attending eight events at the summit. On Monday, he will participate in a “bhoomi pujan” for redevelopment of Gandhinagar station. He will then inaugurate the Vibrant Gujarat Global Trade Show. Later in the day, he will head to Gujarat Science City in Ahmedabad, where he will inaugurate the Nobel Laureates’ meet and interact with the nine Nobel laureates invited for the event.

On Tuesday, Modi will inaugurate the summit and chair a closed-door meeting with 60 CEOs from across the globe.

MSMEs have accounted for the lion’s share of MoUs signed during the earlier editions of the summit.

This year, 25 per cent of MSME units in the state’s ceramic cluster at Morbi downed shutters in the wake of demonetisation and also impacted small diamond polishing units in Surat.

“Despite the problems faced by our sector, we will be inking a few MoUs just to keep the government happy. These are non-committal MoUs. What is the harm,” said a ceramic unit owner from Morbi.

This year, the influential real estate lobby had threatened to boycott the event, but later agreed to join it. “We had protested because the state government was not honouring the old MoUs and not sanctioning projects. However, the government has assured us that they will look into the issue and help us get clearance for the projects. So we have decided to participate in the summit,” said Dipak Patel, President of Gujarat Institute of Housing and Estate Developers, a city chapter of CREDAI.

Meanwhile, questions are being raised over the summit’s role in creating jobs. Dalit leader Jignesh Mewani tweeted on January 3: “We will disrupt the ‘Vibrant Gujarat’, for it is nothing but a gimmick to fool job-aspiring youth and loot farmers.” OBC leader Alpesh Thakor is set to take out a rally against unemployment.

However, government officials said the summit has been instrumental in creating jobs.

This year, the investments will be more than the 2015 edition of Vibrant Gujarat, say state government officials.

Source: The Indian Express