Mukesh Ambani to invest Rs 5000 cr in West Bengal, promises Reliance Jio will cover every village

Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani on Tuesday lavished praise on the West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, saying, "Didi, under your leadership, West Bengal is becoming the best Bengal." Ambani also unveiled an ambitious plan for his telecom company Reliance Jio in the eastern state.

"Our current Jio network covers 1,000 towns and nearly 39,000 villages in the state. Jio will reach 100 per cent of West Bengal's population by December 2018. Every last village will be covered by 4G technology. We are embarking on an ambitious project of connecting Bengal with optical fibre," Ambani said at the two-day Bengal Global Business Summit.

RIL Chairman also committed investments to the tune of Rs 5,000 crore in the state for non-Jio businesses in the next three years. The investment will be in businesses such as petroleum and retail.

Jio is aiming to connect every education institution and hospital in the state by December 2019. The group will launch the digital service centre in five districts of the state to facilitate digital entrepreneurs. Ambani said the group has prioritised the availability of 4G Jio phone in the state with effective zero cost.

The investment will also promote electronic industry by manufacturing mobile phones and set top boxes, Ambani said.

He said RIL has already pumped in Rs 15,000 crore in the telecom business in the state although it had earlier committed to invest Rs 4,500 crore.

"Didi, we could make this large investment only because you have created a friendly climate and an enabling policy infrastructure," he said, adding that RIL has emerged as one of the largest investors in Bengal.

Most of the investment has been made in creating fourth-generation high-speed mobile and internet network for Reliance Jio, the telecom arm of RIL.

Also, Reliance will work with "multiple partners to explore setting up next generation state-of-the-art electronics manufacturing facilities and make West Bengal the hub for innovation and hi-tech technologies for consumer devices such as mobile phones, set-top boxes, and other devices", he said.

Starting in 2015 through a public Wi-Fi Experience Zone in Park Street, Jio has enmassed over 1.2 crore customers in the state, Ambani said.

He said the digital economy will bring prosperity at more than double the speed of the traditional economy.

While Jio will reach 100 per cent of state population before the end of 2018, it is "embarking on an ambitious project of connecting Bengal with Optic Fibre", he said.

Also, Reliance is setting up Digital Service Centres across India to bring Government to Citizen (G2C) services within easy reach of every citizen, particularly in the rural hinterland.

It will give birth to digital entrepreneurs in villages and small towns, kick-start e-commerce and support agriculture as well as small and medium enterprises.

Ambani said Bengal has said goodbye to the slow growth rate of the past and today is the fourth largest state economy in India, growing at 15.64 per cent, much higher than the national average.

"Investments in infrastructure have been unprecedented. A global think-tank ranked Kolkata second among the Indian metros on overall economic performance, even ahead of Mumbai," he said. "Today, the state is famous for the ease of doing business! A miracle has happened."

Stating that Bengal today means business, he said the state has adopted "a positive mind-set that can make the impossible possible."

The business summit is being attended by a host of prominent industrialists including L N Mittal of Arcelor Mittal, Sajjan Jindal of JSW Steel, Kishor Biyani of Future group, Uday Kotak, the head of Kotak group and Sanjiv Goenka, chairman of RP-Sanjiv Goenka group.

with PTI inputs