he three-day Vibrant Goa Expo and Summit placed a lot many opportunities for Goan business leaders under one roof. The business to business meetings were serious and as many as 15 international memoranda of understandings (MoUs) were signed by the visiting foreign business delegates and Goan business houses. About 6,500 business delegates including 542 international business delegates attended this event, which can arguably be called Goa’s biggest business event.
One big take away from this event was the announcement made by the Software Technology Park of India (STPI) before Chief Minister Pramod Sawant and IT Minister Jennifer Monserrate that they will invest Rs 40 crore to build an IT infrastructure within 30 months from the date of allotment of land at Dona Paula. “We are determined to expand ourselves in Goa and we will invest about Rs 40 crore to develop incubator, centre for excellence, data centre, plug and play etc for the start ups and small and medium entrepreneurs in the field of IT and electronics,” Dr Omkar Rai, Director General of STPI told Herald.
At the moment STPI has one operational centre as Udyog Bhavan, which is operational for start-ups of this State. STPI has been creating centre of excellence all over the country which is for $136 billion strong exporting industry.
“The encouraging part is that we had generated enquires worth Rs 1,150 crore prospective business and this is a very healthy sign. We now have to follow-up and build up on these opportunities. This is just the beginning. We will work on these relationships and continuously explore business and investment opportunities between Goa and the rest of the world,” Rajkumar Kamat, President of Vibrant Goa Foundation told Herald.
According to Manoj Caculo, President, GCCI this was indeed a momentous occasion. “It is heartening to see such a positive response from visiting trade delegations. We at the Chamber of Commerce will build on this start,” Caculo added.
Founder and Managing Director of Global Networks, Jagat Shah, who spearheaded the event by this uniquely devised model, informed Herald that about 520 student buddies were engaged. “There were 410 Business to Business (B2B) meetings and about Rs 450 crore worth of investment proposals were shared.”
During the exercise to host this event, about 180 Goan companies were mentored by experts on how to present themselves before international business delegates. A total of 52 countries participated in the event with 19 international delegations which met the Chief minister Pramod Sawant who had set-up his camp office at the venue. About 16 Indian States also sent their representatives to participate in this event, which had 275 booths and stall as against the earlier plan for having just 170 stalls.
Two world records were also established. One was the largest Feni cocktail and the other was a longest painting painted by all participants who were interested. One unique achievement which the Vibrant Goa Foundation was able to accomplish was that they managed to stick to their word on having a “zero waste expo”. No plastic water bottles or plastic materials were used, except for some of the chairs.
