Mamata to highlight biz opportunities in Bengal

London: Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday left for Edinburgh to attend a business meeting scheduled to be held on Wednesday, which will be organised by Scottish Development Corporation in collaboration with Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). She has also received a formal invitation from the Scottish government for the same.

In her maiden visit to Scotland, Banerjee travelled for four-and-a-half hours by train to reach its capital Edinburgh, passing through the breathtaking English countryside referred to by many littérateurs including Bertrand Russell, H G Wells and Bengal's very own Rabindranath Tagore in their innumerable works and compositions.

There will be a lot of SME firms in Scotland who are looking for avenues to invest or collaborate with Indian companies. The organisers have held similar meetings with other states but it is for the first time that they will be meeting a delegation from Bengal.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee along with state Finance minister Amit Mitra and Chief Secretary Malay De will meet the British investors. Industrialists from Bengal including Purnendu Chatterjee, Harshavardhan Neotia, Umesh Chowdhury, Tarun Jhunjhunwalla, Rudra Chatterjee, Keshav Bangur, Mayank Jalan, Sumit Dabriwal, Partha Ghosh and Srikant Venkatesh will attend the meet and will share their experiences of running business in Bengal.

Food processing and purification of water are two important issues that are likely to come up for discussion. Both Mamata Banerjee and the industrialists are very optimistic about the entire exchange.

In the FICCI-UKBIC roundtable which was held in London on Monday, the Chief Minister had strongly pitched for investing in Bengal. She had given every assurance to those present at the meeting that the state government would give all possible assistance to them and as there is no dearth of talent in Bengal, it will be the ideal destination for investment. The investors have expressed their happiness over the discussion and particularly the positive attitude of the Chief Minister.

The businessmen from Bengal while sharing their experiences at the roundtable unanimously spoke about the positive attitude of the Bengal government in providing all the necessary support to the industries.

Steel baron L N Mittal had invited Banerjee to his residence and she, in turn, invited him to join the Bengal Global Business Summit scheduled to be held in January 2018.