writingonblog uncensored: Uttar Pradesh vows to chase southern states indust...

writingonblog uncensored: Uttar Pradesh vows to chase southern states indust...: C Shivakumar @ Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh, long associated with agrarian economy and jobless growth, is seeking to rewrite its economic narrativ...

Uttar Pradesh vows to chase southern states industrial lead

C Shivakumar @ Lucknow:
Uttar Pradesh, long associated with agrarian economy and jobless growth, is seeking to rewrite its economic narrative. Its Industries Secretary Vijay Kiran Anand has a blunt pitch for investors weighing opportunities in  southern states -- look north, where a vast domestic market and falling freight costs are making the state increasingly competitive.

Briefing a delegation of journalists from Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, Kiran said that India's most populous state — long an underperformer in manufacturing investment relative to its economic weight — is closing the gap with the south not through incentives alone, but through hard infrastructure. Nearly half of India's Dedicated Freight Corridor, 47 of its 115 stations, now runs through Uttar Pradesh, cutting the time for goods to reach ports to two days and radically lowering transport costs that have long favoured coastal manufacturing hubs.

"Industries like auto and electronics want to be near ports because of transportation costs," Kiran said. "Now, because of the freight corridor and the expressway network, dry ports have come up — nine of them, four run by the state-owned Concor and five by private operators," he says.

Investment has skewed south for decades, drawn by port access and a services boom that states such as Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Maharashtra built on earlier social-sector spending. Uttar Pradesh, by contrast, still derives its growth largely from manufacturing and a still-agrarian base — 75-90% of its land is irrigated, and three-quarters of the population depends on agriculture.

"Tamil Nadu is a port state, which is why it has auto clusters for export and electronics manufacturing. UP has a huge domestic market, which is why cement, steel, and similar companies are setting up here. UP also has a large talent pool — 56% of the workforce is around 25 years old, a very young workforce," says Kiran.

While Tamil Nadu, the most urbanised state is facing shortage of usable industrial land, Uttar Pradesh claims it has 75,000-acre land bank. "Farmers are reluctant to give up land. But going by our experience with large airports and expressways, land acquisition here hasn't become controversial — there's now a set process, and we're able to do it even for industrial clusters," he says.

That land is now anchoring the state's defence manufacturing ambitions. Pressed on why the Uttar Pradesh Defence Industrial Corridor — now eight years old — has attracted only around Rs 4,000 crore, Kiran noted the programme effectively began in 2021, not at its 2018 launch, and that 60-70 companies have since committed across its six nodes. The Kanpur node already hosts India's largest defence-manufacturing facility, while Lucknow is producing BrahMos missile systems. In Aligarh, all but 350 hectares of a 5,500-hectare site have been allotted.

Where the state concedes ground most readily is services. Uttar Pradesh has yet to build the Global Capability Centre and IT ecosystems that have made Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad magnets for high-paying jobs — a gap the secretary attributed to the south's earlier investment in social infrastructure. With 56% of its workforce under 25, some 8,000 educational institutions and roughly 200,000 STEM graduates a year, the state produces more labour than it can currently employ at the top end, feeding migration south which Kiran says that the state now want to reverse through a dedicated GCC policy.

The state's MSME base — 9.6 million enterprises, of which 7 million are registered on the government's Udyam portal — is being organised around a "One District, One Product" model that originated in Uttar Pradesh before being adopted nationally, pairing roughly 75 districts with signature local products, from Lucknow's chikankari embroidery to regional food-processing clusters.

Urbanisation remains the starkest gap with the south: at roughly 30%, against Tamil Nadu's 50-60%. However,UP's urban population alone, at 7 crore, exceeds Tamil Nadu's entire population, the secretary said.

writingonblog uncensored: Tata Trusts moves to unlock Rs 25,000cr exit route...

writingonblog uncensored: Tata Trusts moves to unlock Rs 25,000cr exit route...: Chennai: Tata Trusts has put forward a proposal to help the Shapoorji Pallonji (SP) Group cash out part of its long-held stake in Tata Sons,...

Tata Trusts moves to unlock Rs 25,000cr exit route for Shapoorji Pallonji Group

Chennai:
Tata Trusts has put forward a proposal to help the Shapoorji Pallonji (SP) Group cash out part of its long-held stake in Tata Sons, in a move that could finally resolve one of Indian corporate history's most protracted shareholder standoffs.

The plan, tabled by Noel Tata, chairman of Tata Trusts, at a Tata Sons board meeting, would see the group's holding company buy back shares from two SP Group entities — Sterling Investments Corporation and Cyrus Investments — in a deal expected to fetch at least Rs 25,000 crore.

The proposal follows a series of discussions between Tata, Tata Sons chairman N. Chandrasekaran, and Shapoor Mistry, who heads the SP Group.

Under the structure understood to be acceptable to the SP Group, the share sale would be executed in two tranches over 18 months, with Tata Sons pursuing a selective capital reduction through the National Company Law Tribunal. Shares would be valued using the income-tax fair value method under Rule 11UA of the Income Tax Rules, 1962 — setting a floor, rather than a ceiling, on the eventual payout.

Tata told the board that funding could be drawn from a mix of sources: internal cash flows, sales of listed shares, bringing outside investors into newer Tata businesses, and potential listings via offer-for-sale of some group companies. He asked the board to authorise the NCLT process and instructed the Tata Sons and Tata Trusts management teams to continue talks with the SP Group and its bankers, reporting back periodically.

The move marks the latest chapter in a dispute that has simmered since Cyrus Mistry's ouster as Tata Sons chairman in 2016. The SP Group, which holds an 18.4 per cent stake in Tata Sons, has for years sought liquidity from the unlisted holding company — a request complicated by Tata Sons' private status and the absence of a ready market for its shares.

India's Reactor Ambitions Race Ahead of Safety Codes, says ASME India

 

Chennai:
India's rapid nuclear and hydrogen expansion is creating a growing need for new and updated technical standards, according to Madhukar Sharma, President of ASME India Private Limited, the US body whose codes underpin safety regulation for pressure vessels, piping and boilers worldwide.

India's atomic energy regulator relies on ASME Section III as the baseline code for Class 1 reactor components — the safety-critical parts of the country's pressurised heavy water reactors, a design lineage traced to CANDU (Canadian Deuterium Uranium) technology but substantially indigenised since, Sharma said on Friday on the sidelines of the second day of the International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition India, held in Chennai.

He said India’s indigenously designed Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor used the French RCC-MR code. The code is used for the design and construction of mechanical components in nuclear power plants for relevant high-temperature mechanical components.

India has no Small modular reactor (SMR) specific code, and companies are operating on proprietary in-house standards while global codes — a joint effort between ASME and the Japanese Society of Mechanical Engineers covering both fission and fusion — remain in draft, expected within a couple of years, Sharma added.

He said that India has published draft rules this week opening the nuclear sector to greater private participation, which ASME expects could accelerate the standards pipeline within six to twelve months. The absence of settled codes is compounding a separate supply-side constraint: India has just four or five qualified suppliers of nuclear-grade materials, against an estimated need for 50 to meet the country's target of 100 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2047, ASME said.

Sharma said that Light water reactors (LWR) are now gaining ground, and that's arguably where India should be investing next, much as it once invested in Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor technology — a choice partly shaped by India being excluded from LWR technology transfer in earlier decades. That constraint has eased considerably, and LWRs offer scalability into SMRs and even smaller, mobile reactor formats.

India has begun expanding nuclear engineering education at institutions including IIT Bombay and IIT Madras, while ASME is working with faculty at institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science on curricula, he said.

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writingonblog uncensored: Chennai FTWZs can ease customs, working capital pr...

writingonblog uncensored: Chennai FTWZs can ease customs, working capital pr...: CHENNAI: Free trade warehousing zones (FTWZs) in Chennai can help exporters reduce customs delays and ease pressure on working capital, acco...

Chennai FTWZs can ease customs, working capital pressures for exporters

CHENNAI:
Free trade warehousing zones (FTWZs) in Chennai can help exporters reduce customs delays and ease pressure on working capital, according to DP World’s 2026 India Country Report.

The report, which was released on Monday, cites Chennai’s FTWZ, along with those at Nhava Sheva and Cochin, as examples of how businesses can manage rising trade volumes amid growing uncertainty.

The report states that Indian businesses are placing greater emphasis on resilience than their global counterparts. Supplier diversification is the leading priority, followed by increasing inventory and friend-shoring.

Technology adoption and entry into new markets are also key drivers, with more than half of Indian businesses having fully digitalised customer-facing services, compared with fewer than four in ten globally. AI is already improving route optimisation, documentation and customs efficiency, strengthening supply-chain resilience, ther report stated.

New free-trade agreements with the UK and the EU are expected to support trade, while tariff changes and geopolitical tensions continue to create uncertainty. The uncertainty is prompting companies to strengthen their supply chains. About 70% of Indian executives are diversifying suppliers, compared with 51% globally, while 59% are increasing inventories to guard against disruptions, the report added.