Punjab focuses on investments to create service sector jobs

Punjab, the food bowl of India, wants to shed its agrarian identity, and is focusing on investments to create service sector jobs, its Finance Minister Manpreet Singh Badal said on Tuesday. The Congress-ruled state is organising investor summits to compete with others to attract investments which will create jobs in industries like agro-processing, finance and other services, he said.

"Punjab must be relieved of its duty to grow cereals," Badal said, speaking at a roadshow organised by industry lobby CII ahead of the investor summit to be held in December. "Punjab is also proposing to the government that if the state could be converted into the dairy state of India, the fruit state of India, the vegetable state of India," he told PTI later.

He said industrialising the state is a necessity, and rued that the Punjabi youth is migrating to places like the deserts of Middle East as the favourite destinations of US and Canada have stopped taking people. Acknowledging the presence of drug abuse among the Punjabi youth and its social impact, Badal said this is the pitfall of being a frontline state and attributed the problem as one being created by Pakistan.

He, however, said that the cycle of drug abuse is "towards the end" at present. On the issue of agrarian waste -- where crop burning is leading to pollution problems as far as the national capital -- Badal invited the industry to come up with solutions to take care of the issue.

A delegation led by Badal has been meeting industry in the financial capital, including leaders from the Tatas and also had a breakfast meet with bankers on Tuesday. He said in the last two years, the government has kick-started investments of Rs 50,000 crore and stressed that these are not mere memorandum of understandings alone, but actual work on the ground.

The minister also said that the huge Punjabi diaspora is the real capital of the state and efforts ought to be made to attract them back into the country. He also seemed to welcome Prime Minister Narendra Modi's USD 5 trillion economy target, and stated that the economy should be USD 6 trillion, which will help lift the per capita incomes..