Will visit Bengal to explore investment, tie-up potential in 2018: Patel

Kolkata: Upbeat about the business prospects in Bengal, High Commissioner of Canada in India HE Nadir Patel on Friday said that the year 2018 will see a number of high-level visits from Canada to Bengal for exploring areas for investments and tie-ups, like information technology, infrastructure, renewable energy, food processing, healthcare etc.

"We see a lot of potential here. There have been a lot of reforms when it comes to trade and commerce, infrastructure and ease of doing business. We should make our presence felt here in a much greater way. We are sending a 24 member high-level delegation at the Bengal Global Business Summit, which is scheduled to be held in January 16 and 17. It will be the beginning and following this, there will be more and more meetings in the chamber as well as ministerial levels," Patel said on the event of MoU signing between Indian Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and Indo-Canadian Business Chamber (ICBC) for fostering trade and multilateral relations.

According to Patel, there have been conferences and business meetings in cities like Delhi and Mumbai but such organised meetings have hardly taken place in Bengal.

"We have a business office at Alipore that was set up ten years back. We have already expanded it two months back. We need to understand each other's strengths and deficiencies and for this, we will have more interactions at all levels throughout 2018," Patel said.

Nadira Hamid, CEO of ICBC, said that they have already signed an MoU with Housing & Infrastructure Development Corporation in November and 250 delegates from Canada were showcased the resurgence of Bengal at that time.

"We are bringing in more IT companies from Canada here, with around 20 IT parks coming up in Bengal. Plans are afoot for joint ventures in the field of renewable energy, urban infrastructure, education etc." Hamid said.

It may be mentioned that 400 Canadian companies are active in India but when it comes to Bengal, there are hardly 8 to 10 companies in action.