NEW DELHI: Emaar, a UAE based property developer, has become the first foreign company to make a mega Rs500 crore investment in Jammu & Kashmir. The project will include a shopping mall in Srinagar at a cost of Rs250 crore and the rest of the money will be spent on building an office complex and setting up IT towers in Jammu and Srinagar.
The investment is a significant foreign direct investment (FDI) in J&K and is expected to generate around 7,000 to 8,000 jobs.
According to J&K Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha, the announcement marks a “historic day” for Kashmir. The Indian Government had invited business leaders from the UAE to invest in J&K and become “partners.”
The UAE’s interest in investing in Kashmir can be attributed to India’s soft power in the Arab world, and under the guidance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, J&K has made significant progress towards ambitious infrastructure development, modernisation, and expansion of airports, rail networks, and highways to ease doing business and fuel faster economic growth.
In January 2022, the J&K Government entered into a bilateral agreement with various stakeholders and the Government of the UAE to deliver over a billion dollar worth of projects in the Valley. These projects include the development of industrial parks, a medical college, a specialty hospital, logistics centres, IT towers, and multipurpose towers, in addition to the mega-mall project by Emaar, according to the J&K Government. The project is being seen as a testament to the UAE’s confidence in the Indian market and is expected to open up more investment opportunities in the region.
