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Comrade Basu pleads for US investment

West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu today hoped that the resource-rich eastern states would attract sizeable investment from the United States in the near future.

The chief minister, who belongs to the Communist Party of India-Marxist, made the plea while inaugurating the two-day US Investment Summit, organised by the US-India Business Council, in Calcutta. He said these states would welcome the involvement of the US companies in various industrial activities and pointed out that 24 specific projects had been submitted in the current summit meeting between the business partners.

The chief minister pointed out that leading US companies had already made sizeable investments in the state and some more were in the pipeline. He said the state had received 1,540 industrial approvals since 1991 with a projected investment of about Rs 426.5 billion. Of them, 337 projects were either already implemented or under construction with a cumulative investment of about Rs 172 billion.

He said 90 other units, including the Rs 51.7 billion Haldia petrochemical project and the Rs 14.5 billion Mitsubishi chemical corporation's PTA plant, were now under implementation in the state.

He sought to allay the apprehensions about labour-related issues, and said, "We do not believe in restricting the democratic rights of the workers. However, we are educating them to take interest in production and productivity and also to understand the needs of the industry which has to compete globally."

UNI