After a hiatus of two years owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, the West Bengal government will host the Bengal Global Business Summit (BGBS) in April next year, a highly placed government official said on Monday. The business summit, a flagship programme where the state government showcases the business readiness and investment potential before the global business community, will be held on April 20-21, the official said. ”The pandemic is on the decline and so we have decided to hold the BGBS next year in April. The two dates will be April 20 and 21,” he confirmed to PTI.
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee will also be travelling abroad where she might be holding road shows to promote the state’s industry friendliness to attract more investment here, he said. Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar, who was requested to promote the state as an industrial destination, has also agreed to travel overseas for the purpose, the official said. The last business summit was held in February 2019.
For the 2022 edition, the state government has formed a task force under the chief minister’s guidance. State chief secretary HK Dwidevi and other senior officials of the government have been included in the force, the official said. During the 2019 summit, the BGBS’s fifth edition, Banerjee had announced that it would be a biennial affair. The then finance minister Amit Mitra had claimed that the state had received proposals worth over Rs 12.32 lakh crore at the business summits between 2015 and 2019 and had generated 28 lakh jobs. The 2022 event will not have him as a full-fledged finance minister.
The last edition of BGBS in 2019 which saw 12 partner countries, the government had claimed that the state had attracted Rs 2.84 lakh crore worth of investment which was expected to generate eight lakh to 10 lakh jobs. Some 86 MoUs were signed and 45 business-to-consumer and 1200 business-to-business meetings were held. Last year in response to questions from Dhankhar about BGBS, Mitra had said in the five editions of the event between 2015 and 2019, the state had received over Rs 12.32 lakh crore worth of investment proposals, of which over 50 per cent worth Rs 6.2 lakh crore had gone into the ”implementation mode”.
The Department of Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), a nodal agency under the union ministry of commerce and industry data showed that in 2019, a total 48 industrial entrepreneurs memoranda worth Rs 5844 crore were filed with the agency. In 2020 the number of projects were 27 worth Rs 9552 crore. In 2021, till September 22 IEMs were filed worth Rs 4801 crore. While the Project Monitoring Group (PMG), which is an institutional mechanism for the expedited resolution of issues and regulatory bottlenecks in projects with investments upward of Rs 500 crore, said 75 projects are enlisted with the group worth Rs 2.37 lakh crore.
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