Advantage Assam 2.0: PM, top ministers, leading industrialists to attend summit

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union cabinet ministers, leading industrialists, senior diplomats and business delegations from several countries will attend the two-day ‘Advantage Assam 2.0’ infrastructure-investment summit in Guwahati next week.

PM Modi will be part of the inaugural session, which will include speeches by industrialists Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani, Anil Agarwal, Savitri Jindal and N Chandrasekaran, among others, Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said.

“The response has been very good and till now over 18,000 people have registered for the event. We have received proposals for more than 1,500 memorandums of understanding (MoUs) and are looking at investments beyond ₹1 lakh crore,” Sarma said.

External affairs minister S Jaishankar, Union railways, I&B and MeitY minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, development of northeast minister Jyotiraditya Scindia, commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal, petroleum and natural gas minister Hardeep Singh Puri and shipping minister Sarbananda Sonowal will attend the summit which will begin on February 24, the CM said.

Jaishankar will be leading a delegation of at least 35 heads of foreign missions to India, including Germany, Italy, Malaysia, Australia, the European Union, Sweden, Thailand and Singapore. The delegation will arrive in a special aircraft on February 23 and visit the Kaziranga National Park before taking part in the summit.

“High level delegations of businessmen from Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore and Bhutan will attend the event. Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman will be the keynote speaker of the valedictory session on February 25, which will include country directors of World Bak and Asian Development Bank,” Sarma said.

Besides the plenary sessions, the summit will also include thematic sessions on different subjects including aero defence, aromatics, bioenergy, tourism, health and start-ups, the CM informed.

“The buzz around the summit has been unprecedented. On February 23, the state cabinet will have a detailed discussion on the over 1,500 proposals for MoUs and will approve only those which we can involve and will actually fructify. We want to see that all such announcements are real,” he said.

‘Advantage Assam 2.0’ will be a sequel to the first investment summit held in 2018 when Sarbananda Sonowal, now a Union cabinet minister, was the chief minister. Multiple MoUs to invest in the state valued at over ₹65,000 crores were signed by companies in the first edition of the summit.