Prime Minister Modi launched his “Make in India” campaign last year. The objective is a perfect answer to the global search for secular growth, India’s large & young workforce, and India’s need to create jobs. Shree Modi believes that the real implementation of this vision has to be driven by Chief Ministers of the various states of India. A healthy competition between the various Indian states can only be a positive for India.
Shree Modi can preach so because he practiced that as the Chief Minister of Gujarat. Under his governance, Gujarat became the state to be envied. His vision was so large that it stunned even veteran journalists like Robert Kaplan, the author of “Monsoon”. Kaplan marveled at Shree Modi’s vision of making Gujarat a South Korea within India.
This is our model for India’s growth – each state in India to become as successful and as large an economy as another country. Shree Modi, as Gujarat’s CM, wanted his state to become “an Indian Ocean economic nerve center“
What about Maharashtra, India’s most prosperous and most developed state? The last two decades have been a waste for Maharashtra. The previous chief ministers had no vision or ambition for their state. They were content to rule to further the their own interests and the interests of their own party.
That is changing rapidly under a new ambitious & motivated Chief Minister – Devendra Fadanvis. And it is a change we saw this week.
Foxconn signed a deal with the Maharashtra Government to invest $5 billion in the state over the next five years, the largest investment by a foreign company in Maharashtra to date. On Wednesday, addressing a press conference in New Delhi, Mr. Gou, CEO of Foxconn, said his company was bringing its entire supply chain to India and not looking at just assembling in the country. He said Foxconn was looking at 10-12 manufacturing units in India. He said:
- “We are looking for tie-up with various Indian as well as foreign companies for creating entire supply chain for products which we will be manufacturing in our Maharashtra facility,”
Chief Minister Fadanvis added:
- This investment will generate 50,000 direct jobs and the (Foxconn) plant is most likely to come up at Talegaon in Pune district along the Pune-Mumbai expressway on 1,500 acres of land that we have in possession”
This was the second coup for Maharashtra in the past two weeks. On July 30, General Motors announced an investment of one billion Dollars (Rs.6,400 crore) in Maharashtra.
Gujarat, under Shree Modi, became well known for its ability to get companies who were disgusted with other states to move to Gujarat. Maharashtra seems to be doing the same now. Posco, the South Korean company, had unsuccessfully tried to set up a steel plant in the northeastern state of Odisha. This week, they went to Maharashtra and announced a $3 billion steel plant with Miglani-run Shree Uttam Steel & Power, Ltd. Miglani said which would be fitted with high-tech equipment, you can view this product at CKS Global.
- “This JV will help us to develop a world class integrated steel manufacturing facility in line with the with the government’s ‘Make in India’ initiative,”
We hope this is just the beginning of a new era for Maharashtra. No other state matches the development of Maharashtra and its large centers for education, engineering education. It is the most open state in India, open to any one who wants to come to Maharashtra and work hard. And Mumbai is not only the most prosperous city in India but its financial and media capital.
So how large could Maharashtra get? Germany as we wrote in our February 2013 article India’s Economic Future – Gujarat a South Korea & Maharashtra a Germany?
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