Hyderabad/Bhubaneswar: Several leading Hyderabad-based companies have evinced interest in making investments in Odisha, a top official said today.

According to him, as many as 24 companies from different sectors shown their desire to explore business opportunites in Odisha during an investors meet held in Hyderabad on Thursday.

A delegation led by Principal Secretary, Industries, Sanjeev Choptra, met the companies to showcase the inherent advantages of investing in Odisha.

“We are pleased to receive an encouraging response from the business community of Hyderabad. Odisha’s investor-friendly policies and the development of world-class infrastructure have received very positive feedback from investors across the country as we have been able to create an ideal business ecosystem for various sectors to flourish in the state,” said Chopra.

He further said that the average time taken for approval of the projects is also reduced to 20 days from the date of receipt of completed project application. Odisha has also made significant strides in implementing the ease of doing business reforms with the compliance percentage going up significantly from 52.12% in 2015 to 97.83% in 2017.

“We are positive about attracting significant investments from Hyderabad-based companies in the near future.” Chopra added.

The 24 leading companies meeting the delegation and exploring attractive growth opportunities across  Odisha’s focus sectors - food processing and seafood, ancillary and downstream industries in metals sector, textiles, ESDM manufacturing, chemicals, plastics and petrochemicals.

During the meetings with investors, the strategic advantages of Odisha were highlighted such as the low cost of doing business, incentives for investors, dedicated sector-specific clusters and over 1,21,000 acres of land bank available for industrial development.  The investors meet witnessed encouraging response

The State delegation invited companies from Hyderabad to participate in the second edition of the biennial ‘Make in Odisha’ Conclave 2018 which has been scheduled to be held in Bhubaneswar from November 11-15, 2018.

Notably, industry body, ASSOCHAM, has ranked Odisha as the No. 1 state in terms of investment implementation rate and the state is consistently ranked amongst the top 3 States in terms of live manufacturing investments in India.  Odisha has registered a GSDP growth rate of 7.94 percent in 2016-17, surpassing the national growth rate of 7.1 percent.