NAGPUR: Nagpurians from across the globe came together to the city on Saturday with a vision of contributing to the city’s progress as the Global Nagpur Summit got underway. It was inaugurated by the union transport minister Nitin Gadkari in the presence of MLAs Sunil Kedar, Ashish Deshmukh and Ajay Sancheti.

In line with the agenda for the summit, organized by Nagpur First, Gadkari made several promises, shared his vision of Nagpur's future and even made appeals to the investors. Among the promises were his attempts to improve education, transportation and tourism in the city, while the requests he made to the global Nagpurians focused on making the city a manufacturing hub.

As transport minister, Gadkari said he planned to initiate a satellite-based traffic violation monitoring system on whose backend office could be located in Nagpur. His vision is to reduce pollution levels of the city by ensuring that buses here ran on biodiesel. He asked the city authorities present to make use of the bio-waste, especially from Kalamna market, to generate fuel. “This fuel would only cost Rs44 per litre. In Chennai, algae-based fuel costing Rs 25 per litre is being used. We really need to find import substitutes for fuels,” he said.

He also invited Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) authorities to initiate steps to build a busport, a state-of-the-art infrastructure from where buses could ply, saying the central government would finance the entire project. Gadkari also promised a satellite dry port would be opened near Sindi railway station in the next 15 days. “This can be utilized by the 400+ saw mills in the city for manufacturing wooden tiles,” he said.

Gadkari called for investments for making the city an electronics and hardware manufacturing hub, extraction of urea from coal mined in Ballarshah and a specialized centre where artificial eyes and limbs could be manufactured and fitted. He also informed that a team from Symbiosis University was in the city scouting for land for a planned skill development centre with a capacity of 10,000 trainees.

He told the prospective investors this was just the right time to invest in India. Talking specifically of Nagpur, he said the investors would get their return on investments within 10 years, with 3-4% interest per year. He exhorted everybody present to contribute towards making Nagpur a top notch city by 2020.

