Maharashtra received 50 percent of total FDI, says Fadnavis

Hyderabad, Sep 23 (IANS) Maharashtra attracted 50 percent of the entire Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) which came to India during 2016-17, state Chief Minister Devandra Fadnavis said on Saturday.

Addressing Indian School of Business Leadership Summit (ILS) here, he said the state topped the list with FDI of Rs 1.20 lakh crore while Delhi stood second with Rs 14,000 crore.

He claimed that the global community had shown confidence in Maharashtra due to the reforms brought by his government over last three years.

Eminent leaders from politics, business, technology, sports, academia and entertainment were participating in the 15th edition of ILS, the School's annual leadership conclave.

Speaking on 'Governance Tomorrow', Fadnavis touched at length on how politics in India today focuses on performance and competitive leadership, which in turn has led to Indian leaders being highly revered globally.

"Today's Leadership is all about inspiring people and creating processes," he said.

He explained about the challenges faced by his government in various sectors and how it overcame the same by installation of systems and procedures.

Fadnavis said they had taken several initiatives to improve Ease of Doing Business (EoB) in Mumbai and was confident that this would drastically improve its World Bank ranking.

He later told reporters that he has requested the Centre's Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion (DIPP) to differentiate between large states and smaller states for their EoB ranking.

"Maharashtra is a large state and it is very difficult to put processes at every place," he said.

The state was ranked 9th by DIPP for 2016.

On Goods and Services Tax (GST), he admitted that he was initially worried of losing revenues to other states with Maharashtra being manufacturing state and GST being consumption based tax.

Fadnavis claimed that in the first two months, Maharashtra crossed its target. "If the trend continues we may not required to claim compensation from Centre," he said.

The CM said 2.50 lakh traders registered under GST during last two months against 70,000 registered under VAT.

Fadnavis said they were putting in place a system to pump out rain water into the sea and 60 percent of the work was completed. He explained that the city was facing problems when there are both torrential rains and high tides.

He claimed that agriculture, which was registering negative growth for four consecutive years, grew by 12.5 percent during the last financial year. He said this became possible due to various steps including convergence of 14 different schemes, Awater conservation programme and reforms.

The CM said 50 percent of the state's population was dependent on agriculture though the sector contribute only 10 percent to the SGDP. He said 15-20 percent people dependent on agriculture need to be shifted to other sectors of the economy.