Bengaluru is Karnataka's USP, but its infra a big worry: Sunil Kanoria
Sunil Kanoria, vice chairman of one of the country’s leading infrastructure finance companies and president of industry chamber Assocham, says the state government’s top priority must be to draw up a blueprint for the city’s long-term future and begin building up its infrastructure.
Being at the head of an infrastructure finance company as well as industry chamber Assocham, how do you view Invest Karnataka?
These kinds of events are a positive sign that the state government is serious about drawing in investments. But the main concern is the city of Bengaluru. This is a city of entrepreneurs. I told the Chief Minister that the government must invest in the city. Infrastructure is a worry. What’s positive is that the state has created a special ministry for infrastructure. Now, it’s important to make a blueprint, plan for how the city should be 50 years later, not for five or 10 years, and begin the transformation now. The city needs multi-layered fly-overs, like in Tokyo; why is there still no Metro rail to the airport if you want to connect Bengaluru to the world? The Metro should be expanded to the airport and to cover all of the city.
We have had investors’ meets in the past, too. Large investments are promised, and then less than 10-20 percent materialize. The investments promised in mining, for instance, did not come at all.
True, the biggest dampener has been the mining sector. The ban on mining hurt a lot of people. Some small and medium contractors who had put in a lot of equipment have even committed suicide. But now the regulations are falling into place, the sector is slowly opening up. Karnataka has a huge opportunity in mining. We need raw material production here for the steel industry, etc.
Defence is another strong sector in Bengaluru, and with Make in India, its potential increases even more.
Andhra and Telangana are aggressively going after investments, with policies like deemed approvals if their governments do not respond to proposals within given timeframes. What did you find satisfying in CM Siddaramaiah’s speech and generally in the state government’s approach?
Karnataka has always been relatively positive in our experience. The CM spoke of ease of doing business. It has been better here than in many other states, but if he is able to push it more, that will be congenial for development.
We have not had much negative feedback on ease of doing business in Karnataka from our Assocham members. So, if that’s not a problem area, then perhaps Karnataka does not need to copy other states on this count. You have to decide your priorities.
To my mind, the state’s USP is Bengaluru. It has always had great weather, and in the past it used to have good infrastructure also. But now the city has overgrown. Therefore the priority must be city infrastructure.
Given the global economic signals, especially from China, what is in store for India?
The growth rate is a positive. 2016-17 will not be great, but I expect 2017-18 to be. I will not be surprised if we do better than 8-8.5 percent GDP growth in 2017-18, because the momentum of the policies being put in place, infrastructure being built will begin to be felt then.
Look, there will be some impact of China, they will have a tendency to dump goods on India, etc., but the advantage India has is that our internal economy is strong, and it has potential to grow.
So, we have to look inward now to grow. How do we take advantage of the situation? Focus on domestic consumption and asset creation. China began to create infrastructure 25-30 years ago. Now, it’s our time. These are all the right buttons that the PM is pressing.
