Broken promises & paper plans: What went wrong with Advantage Assam 1.0

Guwahati, Jan 19: As the state gears up to host Advantage Assam 2.0, questions have been raised about whether the first edition of the investment summit had served its intended purpose. Despite being organised with extraordinary glitz and glamour, Advantage Assam 1.0 turned out to be a damp squib.

The first edition of the summit, held in February 2018, had witnessed the signing of 200 MoUs ostensibly worth Rs 1,00,000 crore. But the actual investments were worth only Rs 51,958.20 crore, and the majority of them were from PSUs.

According to information shared by the government in the State Assembly last year, seven projects of NRL, ONGC, and OIL worth Rs 1621.64 crore and one private sector project (EPL Limited) worth Rs. 39.85 crore have been commissioned to date.

"The ecosystem was not geared up to welcome investors. Once the curtains came down on the summit, the ecosystem was back to square one, and the departments and agencies came back to their own way of working. Post-event facilitation was poor, and handholding was lacking. The reason why investors are looking at Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Tamil Nadu is because of the better investment ecosystem there," an official associated with the first edition of the event said.

"The single-window clearance system is still on paper. Investors still have to run from pillar to post to obtain clearances. Unless district officers and staff of the government departments are sensitised and trained to handle investors, two days of such extravaganza cannot yield any success," he said.

According to industrialist and chairman of the Assam chapter of ICC, Sarat Kumar Jain, though the first edition of the event had a great vision, there was a lack of ground-level preparedness.

"Bureaucratic inefficiencies and slow project approvals led to scepticism. Inability to follow up on numerous MoUs signed at the summit created a trust deficit by not allowing desired projects to attain fruition. Even though policies favourable for attracting investments were made, the implementation of those policies was inefficient and vague," Jain said.

He also felt that infrastructure gaps like bad road connectivity, fewer industrial estates, and fewer logistics chains acted as huge disincentives, while fluctuating power supply further deterred industries dependent on steady sources of energy.

Disputes over land acquisition and compensation delayed projects and discouraged investments. The initiative also failed to capitalise fully on Assam's indigenous strengths, and there was under-representation of indigenous sectors like tea, handicrafts, and agriculture in the summit's vision, Jain felt.

Former chairman of FINER RS Joshi said the first edition of the summit was organised without the mammoth degree of homework it required, and the government virtually outsourced more or less all aspects of the event without ensuring a reasonable amount of the outcome.

"MoUs were signed, but investors, barring a few, were not serious enough about their commitment. Then there was no follow-up. The result was that very few MOUs materialised," he said.

Joshi, however, feels the upcoming edition of the summit could yield better results due to the "better homework" being done by the government, which seems to be "addressing the basic prerequisites and the hard selling done by the Chief Minister himself, even though a bit late."

"The Centre has adopted a favourable approach towards the region, and we can expect big investment by CPSUs in general and the defence sector in particular. But we must also make the climate investor-friendly, and the state government must announce and put in place concrete policy measures facilitating investments, both domestic and global, well before the grand event. Needless to say, we must be in fast mode now as infrastructure has since improved," he added.

By-

Rituraj Borthakur