Mumbai, Apr 28 (NIE): Maharashtra is poised to become a trillion-dollar economy by 2025 with the support of good governance and robust policies, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said on Friday at the India Economic Summit 2018.
“Today our (Maharashtra’s) GDP is around 400 billion. Our average growth rate has been around 8-9 per cent. If we grow at this rate, we can become a trillion-dollar economy by 2028. But we have decided to be a part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dream of making India a five-trillion economy by 2025. We have decided that by 2025 Maharashtra will be a trillion-dollar economy — the only subnational economy in India to be in trillion-dollar club,” said Fadnavis, during a panel discussion on “States as New Engines of Growth”.
He said that the goal could be achieved with an increased focus on the services sector, high productivity in agriculture sector and by bringing down the stress of employment on the agriculture sector.
“We want to shift them from the agriculture sector into the other sectors of the economy,” he said. Fadnavis claimed that the state had redeemed its position as the number one choice for foreign investors with good governance and better policies.
If we compare the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) coming into Maharashtra in 2014 and 2017, it has increased three-fold,” said Fadnavis.
He cited a report by Deutsche Bank that said that 50 per cent of all the infrastructure projects taken up in the country worth over 20 million dollars in investment were in Maharashtra.
“Global investor’s faith in Maharashtra is rejuvenated and last year the entire FDI that came to India 47 per cent came to Maharashtra alone,” he said.
He said that the only sector that had seen a negative growth and was pulling the overall economy of the state backward was the agrarian sector. He said that despite facing acute drought in 40 per cent of the state, the crop yield was high, owing to the sustainability measures put in place by the government.
In the three years, since the state started a decentralised water conservation scheme — Jalyukta Shivar, 11,000 villages have become water self-sufficient and drought-proof and 6,000 more villages were in the pipeline, claimed Fadnavis.
“The entire water level in the state has gone up by around 5 metres and even in water-stressed areas like Marathwada, which has been facing drought for three consecutive years, the water level has gone up by 3 meters. This has been possible because we invested more in water conservation and that has yielded us more crop,” he said.
Taking a dig at the previous Congress-NCP government, Fadnavis said that the state had earlier lacked good governance and therefore the growth rate had been poorer than other states.