Mr Tata; Ministers; High Commissioner; and all the delegates, distinguished friends and everyone gathered here, I wish you a very good afternoon:
But I can feel that it is not exactly the best of afternoons. And then also standing here and boasting about the sand the sun and the sea is rather difficult when the weather is doing this to us. But be rest assured this is not how your usual Maldives whether is. You have glimpses of sun occasionally.
We are indeed very pleased that one of the best and most able of investment groups and business entrepreneurships has been introduced to the Maldives. It was initially, as pointed out by the High Commissioner, introduced to the Maldives back in 1981. But that was under very different and difficult circumstances, both in India and the Maldives, in terms of what free enterprise and entrepreneurship is.
So many years after independence, we are so pleased and glad that India has been able to lay down the foundation of very many social protection networks, and then have been able to and found that the next step for them would be to open up their economy and for the brilliant and excellent Indian entrepreneurship to go abroad. They have started coming to the Maldives and we are, as I said, very pleased by that. We want to encourage more of it. And in this hotel trade we want to see how best we maybe able to amicably learn and gain from each other.
This government has a very ambitious privatisation programme. We feel that the government of Maldives is very heavily burdened with a number of state-owned industries, that perhaps would best be run by privately and therefore, the people of this country can gain much better from that.
So we have a programme that we want to see who may be interested to have joint ventures and also just by themselves invest in the Maldives - invest in the industries - and to have benefits to both sides. We believe that the tourism industry in the Maldives is very lucrative. Your return would be very handsome, And I am sure Taj would understand that very well. Since the early 80s the company has been here in the Maldives and they would have learnt and understood how handsome the returns are from Maldives.
Labour here is good. The returns here are good. And all the other conditions here have been very good and very receptive to international entrepreneurships. So we would like to see more of that coming our way. Here is a government here quite willing to take part in all the private sector investment programmes that any country or any person would want to establish and run in the Maldives.
We have very recently been trying to find investors in utilities, transports, schools, hospitals and many other public services. In the past most of the private sector investments have been mainly narrowed down to or rather channelled towards just tourism. We want to see it broaden. We feel that a lot of other activities are related to tourism. Tourism industry is thriving not only because we have good resources in terms of the sun, the sea and the sand but also we are able to deliver a number of services and number of needs that is so required to this industry. This country has, I would like to say brought it down to a fine art on how to build and how to run a resort. Tourism and resort style tourism rather is very much a Maldivian product.
If you look back to the 80’s or the early 70’s and mid 70’s you would see that this form of tourism is very rare and this really is a product is style of the 80’s and it really came from the Maldives. Of course it was developed by international entrepreneurship - there no doubt about that. And many since then, has been exporting these concepts and these ideas to all sorts of places. Others are also doing very well from these concepts, but we believe we are doing fairly handsomely thought these concepts.
We have been able to attract very big hotel chains and brands. They are increasingly expanding there chains and the capacity that they have here and we are certain that Taj and the Tata Group and all the resort owners and property developers in India would have an opportunity or would see that there are opportunities here in the Maldives.
Similarly, I would like to point out and I’m sure there are others who are more equipped than me to come to this observation. We don’t only sell the sun, the sea and the sand industry and the sand. The tourist is very often buying electricity, water and the sewerage facility. In my mind the private sector and mostly the resort operators, they produce more electricity than the state owned companies. They own more miles of sewerage systems than the state and they produce more water than the state. So they must be more quipped and more experienced in producing these products or utilities.
We have a very strange situation in the Maldives. Right next to a very developed island such as this, you would find a very under developed island where the people live. They don’t have electricity or reliable electricity there. They don’t have reliable sewerage systems. They don’t have safe drinking water. We have been trying to come up with a model where we can combine the developed island next door and the developing, underdeveloped Maldives Island next door. If we can combine the utilities services by connecting grids and so on, I am sure it becomes more profitable for the resort as well and also for the livelihoods of many other people.
These islands are small and therefore, the need of an effective transport system so that you can have bulk of your labour sleeping with their wives and husbands that would create a better environment. It would in my mind give more room for further development in scares lands and resorts.
So we are hoping that others would test these models of how we maybe able to combine utilities of resorts and inhabited islands.
Very often, in the Maldives people live in clusters of islands. So right next to this island…again we are talking here… Hen’badhoo… there are no island near it … so we are talking about the wrong island here. But very often right next to a tourist resort you would find three or four inhabited islands. And these islands are in clusters, and we want to see if one utility company would provide electricity and utilities to all these islands and get the benefit of sales and other economic benefits of larger operations.
We have always been very mindful about what is happening to the climate. We believe that the science is now sorted and the climate is actually changing. Now these rains…we were suppose have had in June and July and now we get them always in august then again some one can point out whole lot of other statistics and tell me that I am wrong. I might just very well be. But in my mind and I am told by many that the science is very sorted. So we really need to find adaptation as well as mitigation measures.
Again resort developers have been in the forefront of the adaptation measures. They are maintaining the beaches. They are looking after their own islands - they are looking after the tress, the coastlines, and they are making sure that their reefs are healthy. For us the reefs are very important but it is again back in the 80‘s Taj had a reef hotel. ‘Reef hotel’ was such a word for coming out to say that this is a reef hotel. You can have a beach hotel. You know, reef hotel is a word. We really need to pick up on the Taj ‘reef idea’.
I have actually come here … I am sure you picked up the reef idea long before we did, because they came here and started a reef resort. They have been looking after there reefs. Now there are more scientific ways of growing a reef or looking after a reef. If we cannot protect our reefs we will not be able to protect ourselves. If you cannot protect the Maldives today, my belief is most of you can understand that you cannot protect your selves, your country tomorrow. So we need to see how best we can run adaptation programmes, and again it is from the private sector that the state is learning and understanding on how you run these measures.
I can actually go on and on. But I wouldn’t inflict that upon you on such a bad weather. But it is such a lovely and happy time to be here. When people are starting things afresh, when relationships begin, they always bloom and we always have so much happiness associated with all that. I am sure you will all take this opportunity to push it that much further, and making all the things related to this a success.
As the Indian high commissionaire pointed out this is the India Maldives friendship week. It is also Indian independence week. We have all grown-up with so many stories of Indian independence. All our heroes are Indian independence heroes. We read them, we listen to them, in fact we look up to them and we try to emulate them. And I believe that the small amount of success that this society in the Maldives has archived is very much because of such good examples next door.
India is the world’s biggest democracy and India is so resilient to all sorts of shocks and never shocked. We are blessed to have such relationships and we want to strengthen it further. I am sure with our new High Commissioner and the very receptive attitude and the policies of the Indian government in Delhi, we will be able to bloom much much further that we have been in the past.
Thank you very much
