Even granting that both are headed into assembly elections this year, the squabble between Karnataka and Telangana on who bagged the latest foreign investment is healthy competition. Yes, there were typical pre-poll anxieties and image management on display. Both states’ governments raced to social media to claim wins. Letters from the foreign investor were tweeted, a letter of intent was seemingly confused with a done deal. But theatrics aside, that Apple partner and Taiwanese contract manufacturer Foxconn has set its eyes on investing in Telangana and/or Karnataka – in another sign of small but significant shifts away from its main manufacturing base in China – is good news for both states and all around.
At a time when global investor summits are quite the rage, CMs from almost all states beaming from hoardings and ads, and apparently wooing foreign investors in multiple ways, bulk of the FDI flows into Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Telangana. All these states are ahead in infrastructure, network capacity, policy stability and reasonably strong in law and order. Little wonder they are also destinations for the bulk of India’s migrant workers.
There’s a difference between South/West and North/East here. UP, MP, Bengal or even Bihar and Jharkhand may be high on intent and big on their outreach to investors – yet MoUs worth lakhs of crores that some states claim have barely moved beyond a summit’s photo-ops. Can rhetoric and claims bring in the global investor? No. And that is what state governments need to understand. Where infrastructure is deficient, connectivity scratchy, law and order sketchy, where fiefdoms, political or otherwise, run their writ with particular venom, where women don’t feel safe, where literacy levels are lower than average, there the investor will certainly not step.