Hyderabad, February 25: Chief Minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy firmly asserted that there is no flight of investment from Andhra Pradesh due to the present political situation here as alleged in some quarters. On the other hand, “more investments are coming in,” he said.
Fielding a question from a reporter after launching website www.advantageap.in at the Secretariat on Thursday as a curtain-raiser for the two-day event, Advantage AP – The Most Preferred IT Destination, being organised here from March 1, he said he had cleared investment proposals to the tune of Rs 25,000 crore on a single day the previous day at the State Investment Promotion Board (SIPB) meeting to facilitate establishment of 25 to 30 units.
Highest investment
He said this was the highest investment approved in a single go in the SIPB’s history. The investment cleared by the board during the past six-and-a-half years was Rs 45,000 crore.
“Can there be any better example than this to assess if there is investment flight?”, he questioned. A Rs 2,500 crore nuclear equipment manufacturing unit would come up at Visakhapatnam.
Asked about the meagre sum of Rs 51 crore allocated in the 2011-12 budget for the IT sector, he said “we should rather get budget from IT industries by way of sales tax etc”. He said the growth of Hyderabad as IT hub was so much that there was no need to conduct summits to showcase it further. What was required was to expand the IT firms, not locating new ones, he said.
Incentives
Information Technology Minister P. Lakshmaiah said the government would offer incentives if IT firms proposed units at second tier cities like Visakhapatnam, Vijayawada, Tirupati, Warangal, Kakinada and Nalgonda, taking Hyderabad as role-model. The present focus was to develop hardware units too.
K. Ratna Prabha, Principal Secretary, IT, said IT exports from the State were expected to reach Rs. 36,000 crore this year compared to last year’s Rs. 33,000 crore. The event was being organised to provide a forum for IT and ITES (IT-enabled services) firms, academic institutions, governments and end-consumers and promote SMEs.
P. Venugopal, director, STPI, L. Suresh and Bipin Pendalya, president and secretary respectively of the ITsAP, were present along with CEOs from several firms.
-Agencis