ITC lines up Rs 8,000 cr investment for Telangana

ITC Chairman Y C Deveshwar on Friday said the company has lined up Rs 8,000-crore investments in the state of Telangana. Half the said investment would go into expanding Bhadrachalam Paper Board.

About Rs 1,000 crore will be invested in a second-star hotel in the city's information technology hub and about Rs 800 crore will be spent on a food processing plant in the chief minister's home district of Medak. Apart from the Hitech City hotel project, the company is also looking at building three more hotels in other parts of the city.

"Now I understand as to why these leaders fought for a separate statehood for Telangana. It is to bring more focus on to the issues of development in the service of people," the visibly impressed Deveshwar said while announcing the plans at the launch of the Telangana government's new industrial policy.

The new industrial policy promises super fast single window approvals and zero tolerance to corruption.

Reminding that two out of the 13 businesses of the diversified business conglomerate,-agribusiness and paper- are headquartered out of Hyderabad city, he said Telangana's new industrial policy was extremely significant in speeding up the industrial development.



"It could be replicated by other states as well but the governance capacity and the leadership makes all the difference here," he said referring to Telangana chief minister K Chandrashekhara Rao.

Half of the said investment would go to the ITC Bhadrachlam Paper Board's expansion whose approvals are already in place. The state government already allotted the additional land required for the expansion of the plant.

ITC would set up a a world-class food processing plant in the chief minister's home district of Medak. Apart from the Hitech City hotel project the company was also looking at building 2-3 more hotels in other parts of the city, according to him.

While complimenting the government for giving due thrust on manufacturing sector, the ITC chairman, however, said competitiveness is equally important to achieve the objective: "If you can not create competitiveness the people of Telangana or people elsewhere in India will not get access to new jobs".

He cited instances where, according to him, about 85 per cent of incense sticks are now imported from Vietnam and the domestic market is being flooded by Japanese notebooks because these items were reserved for small scale sector.

"We are doubling the paper mill capacity to one million tonnes. But in China one single machine produces one million tonnes of paper. That is the scale we are competing with," he said.

Complimenting the start-up incubation initiative taken up by the Telangana government, Y C Deveshwar said value capturing was not entirely based on manufacturing and in this respect the augmentation of intellectual capacity by promoting start ups and innovation really helps further.