Who were the big investors in the Vibrant Gujarat Summit 2022? Are Reliance and Adani among the investors?

You are right, that Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani have made the biggest commitments to the state of Gujarat at the Summit. In fact, bulk of the commitments came from the two native Gujarati businessmen. Interestingly, most of these big commitments made by both th groups were in the green energy and related sectors only. But first let me quickly tell you about how this Vibrant Gujarat Summit started, to put things in perspective.

The Vibrant Gujarat Summit was first held in 2003. The idea was to shake off the devastation caused by the Gujarat earthquake in 2001 and the communal violence in 2002. The idea was to portray a new Gujarat that was vibrant and hungry to get back to business. Over the last 20 years, Gujarat emerged as an investor friendly state with magnetic resonance that attracted investments from all corners of the world; apart from India.

Mukesh Ambani updated the summit that his group had already invested Rs.300,000 crore in the state of Gujarat and in the process had facilitated more than 10 lakh livelihoods in the state. Reliance also plans to double its commitment to Gujarat. Mukesh Ambani charted out a mega plan to invest $80 billion in new energy including solar power, manufacture of electrolysers, solar equipment and green hydrogen; all based out of the state of Gujarat.

For the next five years, Gautam Adani committed Rs.55,000 crore a investments in the state of Gujarat. An investment of a massive Rs.30,000 crore will be towards setting up the world’s largest Solar Hybrid Park in Khavda, in Gujarat. Adani group will also set up a one-gigawatt Data Centre Park in the port city of Mundra. But Adani wants to add copper smelter, refining, cement clinker project and lithium battery manufacturing to that list.

To be fair, it is not just the Adanis and the Ambani family that has committed funds to Gujarat. There were positive commitments from Tata group, Suzuki Motors and Rosneft of Russia etc. Kumar Mangalam Birla of the Aditya Birla group committed to invest Rs.15,000 crore in Gujarat across verticals. In short, there have been huge commitments and as in the past, many of these commitments also translated into business at the grass root level.