TCS Pact Done in 90-min, Says Andhra Minister Lokesh on ‘Speed of Doing Business’

It is no longer ‘ease of doing business’. The new mantra of attracting investments is "speed of doing business" which helped the Andhra Pradesh government close the deal with TCS to set up a campus in Visakhapatnam in just 90 minutes, Minister Nara Lokesh said.

In an interactive session at the ITServe Alliance Synergy Conference in Las Vegas (USA), Lokesh said Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu-led NDA regime in the state is actually looking at business processes reengineering in the government to deliver seamless governance in the hands of people, making officials and politicians irrelevant.

"So when I met Chandra Sir (N Chandrasekaran), chairperson of Tata Sons, I was asking him what his advice would be to me. He said just focus on the speed of doing business.

"So our singular focus is on the speed of doing business. We will create a very conducive environment in Andhra Pradesh in terms of attracting investments and grounding those investments. And one example of that is how we closed TCS in a 90 minute meeting. That is the way we will work and get investments into the state of Andhra Pradesh," Lokesh said, replying to the query.

Lokesh recently in a post said Tata Consultancy Services will set up an IT facility in the state, which will house 10,000 employees.

Emphasising the "speed of doing business" he said corporates would be spending billions of dollars on projects and even a six-month delay would throw the business plan out of gear.

He further said India requires a lot of policy intervention at the national level to attract greater investments into the country.

Lokesh said Andhra Pradesh is not just competing with other states but also foreign countries such as Vietnam for attracting electronics investments and Ecuador on aqua exports.

The minister said he strongly believes that Visakhapatnam with its right ingredients such as connectivity, talent pool, can be "IT capital" of the state.

"I jokingly keep saying that Bangalore were to marry Goa and have a child, that will be Visakhapatnam," he said.

According to him, during the TDP’s rule between 2014 and 2019, the government did not do enough to transform processes.

"What we did was digitise the broken process. But this time around we want to correct it. We are actually looking at business processes reengineering in the government," he said.

Lokesh said globally USD 300 billion is getting invested in Data Centres and the aim is to attract USD 100 billion out of it to India with Andhra Pradesh getting the majority.