Vizag loses investors to Vijayawada

By SNV Sudhir

Visakhapatnam, June 4, 2014:  No one seems to be enthused to invest in Vizag despite the city offers best infrastructure and other facilities. Vizag is the next largest city after Hyderabad in the undivided state. It is evident, with number of firms that have recently applied for Registration Certificate (RC) at local commercial taxes office, that Vizag lags behind.

Vizag commercial taxes division has thousands of firms registered in 8 circles coming under its limits. The top tax payers from the public sector units like Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Ltd, Steel Authority of India Ltd., Minerals & Metals Trading Corporation Ltd., and in private sector Cairn Energy (India) (P) Ltd., which is the first off-shore well in the state, Coromandel International Ltd, and Varun Motors (P) Ltd. The division has supported with Visakhapatnam Port Trust and Gangavaram Port which plays a major role in the business activities of the local trade and business community. 

There are around 400 new registrations of the firms that also have operations in Hyderabad. Only 80 firms have totally shifted to Vizag and most of them are small and medium units in manufacturing and trading, which doesn’t offer much to the revenue to the local office.

While the local commercial taxes department has collected taxes worth Rs 1,294 crs, they are expecting the revenue to go up slightly by 10 to 20 percent. According to reports most firms in all the other sectors are interested in investing in Vijayawada-Guntur cluster as it is expected to be the new capital of Andhra Pradesh.

And there are no big names that are going to start operations from the city. Ironically not even a single firm that can have a major investment has shown interest in Vizag. There are reports that, big companies like Mahindra, Sony, Tatas, Samsung have applied for RC at Vijyawada.

 “We are not expecting any sudden jump in the revenue. While there are some companies who has operations in Hyderabad also applied for RC at Vizag, 80 have totally decided to shift to Vizag and applied for new licenses. We are expecting an increase of 10 percent revenue,” said Commercial Taxes deputy commissioner, T Siva Sankara Rao.