BSY seeks Krishna help to get Obama to City

DHNS

• CM keen to showcase B’lore as investment destination

Bangalore, 29 June 2010: Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa is keen to shake hands with US President Barack Obama and showcase Bangalore as the most lucrative destination for global investment during his four-day visit to India in November.

The chief minister met External Affairs Minister S M Krishna here on Monday, giving a fillip to his ambition of getting Obama to Bangalore. He handed over a letter to impress upon Obama to include Bangalore in his itinerary.

Yeddyurappa, along with Chief Secretary S V Ranganath, and a host of other top bureaucrats, met Krishna at the latter’s residence. It is said that Yeddyurappa told Krishna that the City was home to nearly 250 IT/BT companies and efforts should be made to showcase Bangalore to Obama to attract more investment.

At their meeting, Yeddyurappa is said to have complimented Krishna on how, during his chief ministership, he had given an impetus to the IT/BT sectors which have put Bangalore on the global industrial map.

He also told the External Affairs minister that the BJP government was in the process of completing the infrastructure projects which were conceived during Krishna’s regime. To qualify his request to bring Obama to Bangalore, Yeddyurappa told Krishna that the recently concluded Global Investors Meet was a resounding success.

However, Yeddyurappa did not reveal the purpose of the meeting. “It was only a courtesy visit”, he told reporters.

Sources said that a recce team from the Obama Oval office and the US ambassador to India will visit Bangalore in a couple of weeks. The team will visit some more Indian cities.
It is understood that business groups, CII and FICCI, are also doing their bit to get Obama to visit Mumbai’s Taj Hotel which was the target of terrorist attack in 2008. Tamil Nadu industrialists are also lobbying to get Obama as it has a good number of automobile manufacturing units.

As chief minister of Karnataka, Krishna had tried hard to get the then US President Bill Clinton to Bangalore during his visit to India in 2000. But Clinton chose to visit Hyderabad which stole the march on the country’s IT hub. The then AP chief minister Chandrababu Naidu of the TDP, a former NDA constituent, had managed to pull the right strings in New Delhi.

Ten years later, things have changed now. “Its incredible what he has done to Bangalore,” Obama is said to have told Singh of Krishna during a recent interaction in Washington.