Global meet, or local photo-shoot?

If you’ve ever been to a ‘Global Investors Meet’, you’ll know how futile the whole thing is. Almost nothing of what happens in these events has anything to do with attracting investment to the state. It’s one giant photo opportunity. Which is predictable, because none of the lead-up is in place to obtain results.

If you want to bring the leading investors in the country, let alone the world, to Karnataka, at what point should you engage them? Ideally, you would want to have an in-house group that can observe and anticipate broad trends in different sectors, reach out to key players in each of them, and begin to steer their plans towards Karnataka long before they turn into inflows. That is, ‘Invest Karnataka’ has more to do outside the state than inside it.

Take a good look at the advertisements that the government took out for this event. It is clear what’s on offer to investors. Land, and easy clearances. Both of these are very dodgy claims. It’s not a simple matter to give away land, and one cannot wish away the various environmental and other clearance processes for investments that require land. To make good on such carrots dangled before investors, the government has to bypass a lot of rules and laws. Which inevitably attracts opposition and slows things down.

The other claim that the government makes on behalf of the state is that we have a great talent pool of educated and skilled workers. Yes and no. There is a fair bit of this in and around Bengaluru, but that’s the result of a lot of forces that the government doesn’t steer. And perhaps for this reason, the data from the state as a whole isn’t great. The college enrolment ratios in Karnataka are the lowest in peninsular India, and school graduation rates are now at 40% or less.

So why does one go to a Global Investors Meet? To answer that, one has to look at how it is put together. Typically, in various government departments there are ongoing applications for something or the other. Registration, licensing, allotments, etc. The typical GIM gathers these things together and creates an event out of them. It is simple for the government to steer all the applicants towards the GIM. They too don’t mind that, since their routine application is now about to share a spotlight with political leaders and senior bureaucrats. They’ll even bring their own staff as audience.

From start to finish, this is a swa-ha event. The funny thing is that even those attending it concede readily that they’re going through the motions as a public relations exercise and some visibility for themselves and their initiatives. But the event itself is more like a local merry-go-round than a global meet.

For governments that perform well, in fact, there would be no need for an event like this. There would be a steady flow of developments worth celebrating, which will produce meaningful outcomes for the state, putting it at the top of social and economic rankings in the country, and on course to match more developed nations. And ministers would be busy in that world of continuous achievement. But all of that takes hard work, which our political leaders have firmly rejected.

If these meets were merely comic, one could shrug them off. But they’re not. There are real consequences that the people of Karnataka pay for the trivialisation of their hopes and aspirations, and the continuing neglect of their rights to a life of dignity. It is galling that a government that doesn’t invest in the education of all children, can’t muster the basics of infrastructure creation, and creates deep shortages in public transport, housing, financial services, and other spheres holds grand meetings to announce the giveaways of public lands and the side-stepping of regulations.

And all this is even without looking at the kickbacks. It’s an open secret that favourable terms to companies are accompanied by favourable terms from them to politicians, across the country. For our netas, the GIM is a huge scoring opportunity. No work, quite a bit of publicity, and paisa too.

The state does need more investments. But let’s be honest about this -- the first investments have to be in human capital, and the state itself has a high share of the responsibility for this. Any government that isn’t investing in the people can’t really do much more than hold an event to steer the public’s gaze away from its failures.