Kerala plans to attract investment, relaxes norms

Thiruvananthapuram, May 4 (IANS) Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Monday said that it’s time for the state to look forward and attract investments due to huge human resource potential as many state natives would return from abroad.

Vijayan said that his government had decided to relax registration and licensing norms to attract fresh business investments.

“All applications will be processed in a week’s time and conditional licenses given. The investor will have a year’s time to finish all other processes and the state will give time to rectify any lapses,” said Vijayan.

Vijayan said to formulate a robust plan for attracting investments a special task force of experts will be set up.

“It has also been decided to classify all the proposals into gold, silver and bronze categories based on the investments and the total employment such units will generate,” added the Chief Minister added.

“Kerala’s human resource has by now proved to be better than the best anywhere in the world. We are certain that this is our biggest strength to attract fresh and new investments,” said Vijayan.

He pointed out that cities like Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, Kozhikode and Kannur have good airports, roads, railways and ports.

“In these cities, we plan to set up logistics parks, besides making value addition to the Kannur-based Azhikkal port. Another area with huge potential is to make value addition in the agricultural sector and hand over the land available at the Palakkad food park to industrialists to set up units. Coconut park is also a potential one,” said Vijayan.

–IANS

sg/tsb