Welcome to India Edition, I’m Menaka Doshi. Join me each week for a ringside view of the billionaires, businesses and policy decisions behind India’s rise as an emerging economic powerhouse.
Problem of Plenty
India’s plan to build new industrial cities, starting with four in 2016 to 20 now, has so far yielded some $20 billion in investment commitments from local and multinational corporations that could create 80,000 new jobs.
It’s taken 10 years to get here, and the success is most visible in Shendra-Bidkin, a 10,000-acre new industrial city in the western state of Maharashtra, with wide roads and plug-and-play infrastructure, that’s fast selling out of industrial land plots.
From South Korean Hyosung’s already operational textile mill in Shendra to Toyota-Kirloskar’s upcoming hybrid and electric vehicles plant in Bidkin, companies have signed up to invest some 600 billion rupees ($7 billion) in building factories here.
The Dholera Special Investment Region is the most spectacular in scale whereas Shendra-Bidkin is the most advanced in terms of land allocation, investment and number of factories already in production, Rajat Kumar Saini, CEO and managing director of the National Industrial Corridor Development Corporation, said as he discussed what it takes to build a city from scratch.
(From: Bloomberg)