After the last two lacklustre editions of investors' summits - in different avatars of Bengal Leads in 2013 and Bengal Global Business Summit in 2014 - that failed to fetch the biggies of India Inc, this one is likely to draw its most prominent attendee, Reliance Industries' Mukesh Ambani.
"As of this moment, it's almost certain that Mukesh Ambani would be attending the Summit," a source close to the development said, even as the official word from the business group is, "There is no confirmation as yet."
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Ambani's last interface with Banerjee was in 2013 when the who's who of corporate India attended her investors' meet in Mumbai. A government-level meeting in Kolkata for Ambani, however, would date back to the earlier regime under Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, when he had come down to meet the Chief Minister and his industry minister, Niurpam Sen in 2006, soon after the Assembly elections, to discuss a range of projects.
Whether Ambani would meet the Chief Minister separately this time, if he does make it to Summit, is not clear.
Besides Ambani, JSW group chairman and managing director, Sajjan Jindal, is also likely to be present for the inauguration of the two-day summit on January 8. Jindal will be in the state anyway on January 6 to lay the foundation stone with Chief Minister Banerjee for a cement plant at Salboni in West Medinipur, the site for the group's mega steel plant; he will probably stay on for the meet.
Government officials are tight-lipped about investors' participation. A senior minister, however, said that more than 2,000 delegates from across the country and the world were expected to be present for the event.
Business participants from outside West Bengal last year had included N Chandrasekaran, CEO and MD of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Jyotsna Suri, chairperson of Bharat Hotels, Swati Piramal, vice-chairperson, Piramal Enterprises, Niranjan Hiranandani, co-founder, Hiranandani group, and Adi Godrej, chairman of Godrej Group. Many of them were expected this time around as well.
The Summit, however, is not just going to be about private sector investors or investment. At least four key ministers from the Centre, Union Minister for Finance, Arun Jaitley, Union Minister of State for Coal, Power and Renewable Energy, Piyush Goyal, Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways and Shipping, Nitin Gadkari and Union Minister for Railways, Suresh Prabhu, are expected to be there.
Jaitley and Gadkari were present for last year's Summit as well; Of the Rs 2.43 lakh investment proposals that the state claimed to have bagged from the last edition of the Summit, Rs 78,000 crore had come from the Centre, inviting a jibe from BJP leader, Siddharth Nath Singh that the Summit should be named, Centre-aided Summit.