Opposition leaders point to decline in FDI

Chennai: Leader of the opposition in the State Assembly Edappadi K Palaniswami and BJP State President K Annamalai flayed the DMK government for letting the State slip down in attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) after coming to power and even allowing Foxconn to shift its high end I-Phone manufacturing unit for Apple to Karnataka and Telangana.

In what looked like a concerted effort to expose the government, both the leaders issued separate statements on Thursday with statistical data to prove their charges with Palaniswami questioning the Chief Minister for claiming that an ‘investment commitment’ was made by Foxconn to bring in Rs16,000 crore to the State and refraining from using the word Memorandum of Understanding.

Annamalai said that while Stalin said that the company had assured to invest Rs 1,600 crore, providing for the generation of 6000 jobs, in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka Minister Priyank Kharge had subsequently announced that Foxconn would invest US $ 600 million (Rs 4963 crore) in his State.

Palaniswami and Annamalai pointed out that the company had denied Stalin’s claim that it had entered into an agreement to start its venture in Tamil Nadu, prompting Stalin to remove his social media post on the claim, and then signed the agreement with Karnataka government. But Stalin never clarified as to why it happened, Annamalai said.

Tamil Nadu that occupied the third position among the States in drawing FDI during the AIADMK regime in 2020-21 had slipped down to the eighth place with a 27 per cent reduction in FDI in 2022-23, Palaniswami said and quoted a DPIIT statistics on the State attracting US $ 31,140 million investment between April 20 to September 20, 2020, during his time, despite the pandemic.

He reeled out several pieces of data to prove that the State was getting many prestigious business projects from a plethora of multi-national companies during his tenure as Chief Minister and the present government had lost several of them.

Annamalai said that the government was scaring away the potential investors by demanding a 30 per cent commission and Palaniswami urged the government to at least conduct the investors meet it had planned for 2024 by giving up its usual ‘commission, collection, corruption’ mantra.

The leaders also pointed to the foreign junkets of the Chief Minister aimed at attracting foreign investment and said that no investments had come after that to the State. Annamalai said that it was a pleasure trip by Stalin and his family.

They accused the DMK government of letting down the youth of the State as the failure to bring in FDI had led to a loss in new jobs and demanded that it stopped taking the people of the State for a ride by making statements on business activities that were not true.

Palaniswami cited the breakdown of law and order, increase in POSCO offenses, raise in custodial deaths, slip in organ donation, scrapping of many welfare schemes launched by the AIADMK regime, more debts, increased taxes and inflation as some of the setbacks faced by the DMK government.