CII south's 9-point agenda for development

CII southern region (SR) has drawn up a nine-point agenda for development.

Addressing a press conference, ParasuRaman R, chairman, CII southern regional council, said, "The agenda is to develop a shared agreed vision for industrial development of the southern states, work towards value-added tax (VAT) implementation and evolve public private partnership projects for infrastructural development."

ParasuRaman pointed out that VAT, not being implemented in Tamil Nadu, has created fear of losing competitiveness among industries as it would affect their performance. However, he mentioned that there was no formal method of quantifying the impact of not implementing VAT.

The other initiatives will be to facilitate state-level labour and agricultural reforms to enhance the state as an investment destination and regularly discuss procedural issues of common interest and to do key decision making.

The key initiatives for 2005-06 will be Young Indians (Yi), skill development, HIV-AIDS industry intervention, upgradation of ITIs and development of small and medium enterprises (SME) clusters.

ParasuRaman said for the skill development project, 5,000 challenged youth with skills training would be employed by April 2006.

Seven new SME clusters projects will be launched at Bangalore, Hyderabad, Madurai and Coimbatore by April 2006. This is in addition to the existing three SME clusters at Ambattur and Coimbatore.

Under the HIV AIDS industry intervention project , it aims to sensitise 1.5 lakh workers across 150-member companies in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry by March 2006.