BHUBANESWAR: To revive industrial activities post-Covid lockdown, the Odisha Government interacted with members of the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF) in a bid to establish employment intensive investments. Chief Secretary Asit Tripathy and senior officer of Industries Department held video conferencing with investors on Tuesday evening.
The investors were drawn from sectors like energy, agri-business, nutrition, aviation, information technology, metals and renewable power.
The ones which have showed interest in Odisha included ATC, Avaada Energy, Cairn Energy, Cisco, Exxon Mobil, Herbalife, HP, Mars, Microsoft, Oracle and Paypal. Tripathy told the US investors that the State has followed policy consistency in matters of industrial promotion. Odisha is set to roll out more progressive policy in matters of land leasing, contract farming, direct farmer-market connect that will open new avenues of investment, he added.
Interacting with the investors, the Chief Secretary explained the measures taken by the State Government to contain the pandemic. “Many of our industrial estates are now in green zone. As of now, around 60 per cent of the industries are now running by virtue of adopting the Covid preventive measures,” he added. Principal Secretary, Industries, Hemant Sharma said easy availability of land in developed industrial estates, quality power supply, ready to move setting for electronics and IT sectors along with sector specific facilitating policies are benchmarks of Odisha which is a pioneer in single window clearance system for investment proposals. It is supported by a well-developed institutional arrangement through IPICOL, Sharma said.
Among top-five lead states in ‘ease of doing business’, Odisha’s Go-Swift, a single window on-line investor facilitation and tracking portal, has been awarded with Excellence in Government process Re-Engineering for Digital Transformation at national level by Government of India for 2019-20. IT Secretary Manoj Mishra explained the well-developed electronic and manufacturing sector as well as the skilled manpower in electronic and IT. The meeting was coordinated by CMD of IPICOL Nitin Bhanudas Jawale and Mukesh Aghi, president and CEO of USISPF.