Newspaper headlines on February 26, 2025, screamed, “Summit season sees nearly Rs 100 lakh crore investment pledges by India Inc.” State governments of most aspirational states in India appear to have found December, January, and February to be the ideal months for conducting global investors’ summits. It was reported that in just the first two months of 2025, as many as six state governments – of Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, West Bengal, Kerala, and Assam – organized such events and announced investment commitments from potential investors to the tune of Rs 60.5 lakh crore.
In December 2024, potential investors gathered in Rajasthan for the “Rising Rajasthan” event conducted by the Government of Rajasthan. The event was touted as fetching Rs 35 lakh crore in investment commitments.
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In the same month, the Government of Bihar, not to be outdone, organized “Bihar Business Connect,” which is said to have attracted investment commitments worth Rs 1.81 lakh crore. The Government of Odisha, which concluded its “Utkarsh Odisha” on January 28 and 29 in Bhubaneswar, secured investment commitments worth Rs 12.89 lakh crore, which is 1.4 times its GDP.
On February 25, the Madhya Pradesh Government concluded its two-day Global Investors’ Summit and proudly announced investment pledges worth Rs 26.61 lakh crore by global and domestic companies, which is twice the size of its GDP.
“Invest Karnataka,” the Karnataka Government’s investment summit held from February 12 to 15, 2025, saw investment commitments of Rs 10.27 lakh crore. The Bengal Global Business Summit held in Kolkata by the West Bengal Government on February 5 and 6 is said to have received Rs 4.4 lakh crore in investment proposals.
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“Invest Kerala Global Summit,” held on February 21 and 22, 2025, is said to have attracted investments worth a modest Rs 1.53 lakh crore, notwithstanding the state’s robust infrastructure and workforce.
Assam’s own investors’ event, “Advantage Assam 2.0,” held for the second time in five years, is said to have attracted investment proposals worth Rs 4.91 lakh crore, surpassing both West Bengal and Kerala, not to mention Bihar.
These eight states together have announced investor pledges worth over Rs 97 lakh crore in just three months. These are apart from the announcements made in smaller investment summits organized by groups like J.P. Morgan and Deloitte, and central government ministries such as DoNER.
Some states have taken their investment summits overseas. For example, at the recent World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos in January 2025, Maharashtra signed MoUs worth Rs 15.7 lakh crore, while Telangana signed MoUs for Rs 1.78 lakh crore. Andhra Pradesh’s Chief Minister, N. Chandra Babu Naidu, upon returning from Davos, announced that his state was looking at a Rs 10 lakh crore investment commitment.
Looking back slightly, in February 2024, the “Invest UP” event of Uttar Pradesh touted investment promises to the tune of Rs 33.5 lakh crore, or 1.6 times the size of its economy.
States mostly promise, through these summits, easy access, minimal compliances, reformed land and building norms, improved power and water supply, better rail and road connectivity, and stable law and order. There could also be a spurt in the release of new policies, such as Industrial Policy, Information Technology Policy, and Electronics Manufacturing Policy. In return, state governments expect the creation of employment opportunities for their resident population, bolstering the state’s revenues through tax collections, and the creation of a supply and value addition chain-based economy as a spin-off.
However, what percentage of investment promises translate into actual investments remains a question. Seen in perspective, state investment summits started as a phenomenon in the 1990s. Over the years, investment commitments announced by the states have come to be viewed with skepticism, often inviting chuckles in private gatherings from politicians and bureaucrats alike.
One Chief Minister, after such an investor’s summit held in his state’s capital in the 1990s, joked that if all the MoUs just in the power sector translated into reality, his state’s electricity production would be more than that of entire India at that time. This obviously did not happen, highlighting the gap between investment promises and actual delivery.
Sometimes, huge investment commitments are announced by states year after year, without any certainty about how much of the commitment has been realized each year. For example, Uttar Pradesh, following its Global Investors’ Summit in 2023, announced that 18,000 agreements promising an investment of Rs 32.92 lakh crore had been inked. Again, in February 2024, it announced investment commitments to the tune of 33.5 lakh crore. It is not known whether there is any duplication in terms of commitments made on the two occasions. Neither is there any transparent monitoring system in place that the public can access.
Sometimes, it is a contest between governments belonging to different political parties within the same state. For example, Andhra Pradesh under Chandra Babu Naidu in 2018 saw the announcement of investment commitments to the tune of Rs 4.39 lakh crore during the “Sunrise Andhra Pradesh Investment Summit.” This amount included MoUs with Reliance Industries Limited in digital technology and oil and gas sectors to the tune of Rs 50,000 crore. Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone chipped in with promises of investment up to Rs 4,000 crore for a Green Field Airport.
There were promises of aerospace and defense sectors as well. Naidu announced that he was confident of a 90% conversion rate of the investment commitments and proudly stated, “We want the state to be among the top three states in the country by 2022 and the number one state by 2029, not only in terms of per capita income but also happiness.” This obviously never happened.
In three investment summits prior to this, Naidu’s government signed over a thousand MoUs with investment commitments worth Rs 14.89 lakh crore, which did not immediately translate into investment. After Naidu lost power in 2019, it was Jagan Reddy’s turn. At the Global Investor’s Summit, 2023, Jagan Reddy announced the signing of a total of 352 MoUs worth Rs 13.06 lakh crore. The fate of these MoUs is unknown. After Jagan Reddy lost power in 2024, it was again Naidu’s turn. In the last nine months, Naidu announced dozens of MoUs, among which a Rs 65,000 crore MoU with Reliance Industries and a 14,000 crore MoU with Yitoa Micro Technology prominently figure.
Dispassionately seen, Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) are non-legally binding instruments. They are documents that express mutual interest without any firm commitments or timelines. There is no way to discern before or after signing an MoU how much of the investment commitment is actually going to come through. “Vibrant Gujarat,” perhaps the grandest of all investment summits held in India, can be cited as one example.
As per research done by Gujarat Samachar in December 2023, out of 104,872 MoUs signed at the nine “Vibrant Gujarat” summits held between 2003 and 2019, about 25,975 were later rejected by the Gujarat Government itself. Reasons for rejection included the company’s deteriorating financial condition, time and system lapses in acquiring land, delays in availing permits from pollution, fire, or similar boards, etc.
Approximately 35% of the MoUs were dropped for various reasons, while 20% of the projects were yet to commence. 20,000 or more MoUs in the education sector had no monetary investments in them, yet they were categorized as MoUs. According to a statement made in the Gujarat Assembly on September 15th, 2023, only Rs 21,557 crore was invested against MoUs amounting to Rs 945,158.68 crore that were signed between August 2021 and July 2022.
Out of the MoUs worth Rs 79,125 crore signed between August 2022 and July 31, 2023, only Rs 30 lakh in investment was made by December 2023. Out of 55,860 projects signed across 25 sectors in 2021-2022 in Gujarat, 21 sectors did not receive any investment. Among the four sectors receiving an investment of Rs 21,557 crore, Rs 20,055 crore went to the MSME sector alone.
The same is the story of “Magnetic Maharashtra,” the Maharashtra Government’s investment summit, held in 2018 and 2020. On July 26, 2020, the then Industry Minister of Maharashtra, Subhash Desai, lamented that the success of the event did not reflect on the ground, and only a few of the MoUs signed translated into actual investment. He said, “Magnetic Maharashtra is like a fair where there is no time to scrutinise a proposal before an MoU is signed. One knows there is a risk involved, but one goes ahead and signs it anyway.”
There were even instances where MoUs have been signed by state governments in investors’ summits with blacklisted or dubious firms just to inflate the committed investment figures.
There is also no evidence to show that investment summits offer political mileage to the leaders in the state governments. After the initial excitement of the investment summit wanes, and the din of the news channels dies down, reality dawns upon the public when they do not see the promises of development and employment fructifying. As to the senior politicians in Delhi as well as industry stalwarts, they have been attending such summits year after year and in state after state, and it is a repeat act for them.