Maha occupies top spot in foreign investments, says Desai

Maharashtra has bagged a big portion of the Foreign Direct Investments that have come to the country in first six months of the current financial year, a state minister has said.
Of the total investments of Rs 1,44,674 crore that have come into the country in April-September period this year, the state has got investments worth Rs 68,409 crore, Industries Minister Subhash Desai said.
"The state has achieved a percentage value of 84.5 in terms of ease of doing business. It has gone up substantially from 49.5 per cent and is expected to rise up to 90 pc in near future," Desai said, while releasing the data, here recently.

He said Singapore's Asian Competitiveness Association has chosen Maharashtra for top slot in industrial progress.
"The state has become the most favourite destination for foreign investment due to its policies of providing ease of doing business, quality infrastructure, encouragement and skilled manpower," the minister claimed.
The investments have come mainly from Japan, England, Mauritius, USA and The Netherlands in fields like service sector, real estate and infrastructure, computer hardware and software, telecommunications, motor vehicles and medicines.

According to Desai, the state attracted foreign investment of Rs 62,731 crore in 2015-16 as compared to Delhi's Rs 83,288 crore.
However, Delhi lagged behind the state in the April-September period this year by getting only Rs 23,415 crore worth of foreign investment (compared to Maharashtra's Rs 68,409 crore), Desai said.

"These are figures only of equity. If seen along with
reinvestment of profit and other capital investments, this figure becomes all the more impressive," Desai said.
On the impact of demonetisation, he said, "It will have some impact on medium and small medium industries for some time, but with the situation returning to normal, the sector will be back on its feet again."
Desai was also optimistic that demonetisation will not affect the growth of Nagpur's MIHAN project.
The IT industry is anyways not going to be affected. So, MIHAN's IT units will get going. It is also getting new investments, like another aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) depot to be operated by private airline IndiGo, he said.

He also said that as against the earlier times when textile units came up in non-cotton areas, they are setting up all 10 textile parks in the cotton bowls of Vidarbha and Marathwada.