Prime MInister on a two-day visit for Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit
PM Modi will arrive Gujarat on Monday afternoon on a two-day visit to inaugurate the Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit and chair a roundtable with 60 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies in Gandhinagar on Tuesday.
On Monday, he will preside over pre-summit events in Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad.
Touted as the biggest of the biennial business summits, which was conceived and launched by Modi when he was Gujarat chief minister in 2003, the eighth edition will see more than 6,000 delegates participating in eight seminars and business-to-business and business-to-government meetings.
State guests to be present at the inaugural ceremony on Tuesday include Presidents of Kenya (Uhuru Kenyatta) and Rwanda (Paul Kagame); Prime Ministers of Portugal (António Costa) and Serbia (Aleksandar Vučić), and Deputy PMs of Russia (Igor Ivanovich Shuvalov) and Poland (Mateusz Jakub Morawiecki). Memorandum of Understanding worth Rs 30 lakh crore are expected to be signed during the summit.
After the inauguration, Modi will chair the CEO Roundtable on Transforming India. John Chambers, chairman of global technology giant Cisco; Bertrand-Marc Allen, president of Boeing International; and CEO of French electricity giant EDF, Jean-Bernard Levy are among the international CEOs to be in attendance. From India, Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani and other leading industry captains will be part of the CEOs Roundtable as well as the inauguration ceremony.
The Centre is also putting its weight behind the summit. Besides the Prime Minister, 11 union ministers including Arun Jaitley, Manohar Parrikar, M Venkaiah Naidu, Piyush Goyal, Nitin Gadkari are expected to attend the event.
On Monday, Modi will inaugurate Nobel Prize exhibition ‘Ideas Changing the World’ at Science City in the evening where he will meet nine Nobel laureates from across the globe. At the five-week long exhibition, which is being seen as one of the high points of the summit, the Nobel laureates will interact with students, scientists, industry leaders and policy makers.
Among the scientists is Indian-origin Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, who shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2009 with Thomas A Steitz and Ada Yonath. Other laureates who will take part in the summit are Richard J Roberts (1993, Medicine), Harold Varmus (1989, Medicine), David Gross (2004, Physics), Serge Haroche (2012, Physics), Randy Schekman (2013, Medicine), W E Moerner (2014, Chemistry), H C Harmut Michel (1988, Chemistry) and Ada Yonath.
In another engagement Monday evening, Modi will inaugurate the Global Trade Show at Helipad Exhibition Ground in Gandhinagar. The exhibition covering more than 25 sectors is spread over 14 halls across 1,25,000 sq mts, which is said to be the country’s largest exhibition area.
PM Modi will also inaugurate work for a revamped Gandhinagar railway station which will also house a hi-tech 300-room five-star hotel. The project cost is pegged at Rs 250 crore. Though Gandhinagar is not among the busiest stations of Gujarat due to its proximity to Ahmedabad where most trains terminate, the hotel is being constructed keeping in view the large number of delegates coming to the capital for the biennial Vibrant Gujarat summits.