Few heavyweights at CII Partnership Summit

HYDERABAD: The ongoing two-day CII Partnership Summit, touted as the biggest biennial conference, seems to have run out of partners. Major companies from across the country were conspicuous by their absence, as were international delegates.The essence of CII’s signature summit is to showcase India’s potential, especially to foreign participants, as a viable destination for doing business and attract multisectoral investments. But Day one of the event largely witnessed signing of agreements between the state government and city-based companies from energy and power sectors.Due to political uncertainty in 2010, Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) had to shift the venue for the summit from Hyderabad to Chennai. A miffed state government took it as a challenge to host the event in the city this year. The Summit is being jointly organised by the Union Ministry of Commerce, CII and the Government of AP with the theme, ‘New Age Innovation Partnerships’.Though the organisers boasted of over 1,500 delegates from 43 countries, the absence of industry heavyweights, both from within the country and outside, was acute. According to chief minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy, the state stands at the forefront in key manufacturing sectors, including cement, steel, paper, pharmaceuticals and textiles apart from IT and biotechnology. Strangely, participation of industry representatives from these sectors was far and few.While the state government took comfort in sharing prospective investments aggregating to a whopping Rs 5.55 lakh crore from about 233 companies with a potential employment creation of 4.7 lakh, the number of MoUs signed Thursday were just handful.