AMAZING GOA GLOBAL BUSINESS SUMMIT…at the IBW special meet accompanied by dinner on Nov 9, 2024 Malaysian delegate Dato Taizoon Tyabkhan from Penang, with Goa Industries Minister Mauvin Goudinho;

CAN Goa be the gateway for India for business investment? That was the key question mooted at the just over 3-day Amazing Goa Global Business summit 2024 which took place at the Dr Shyamaprasad Mukherjee Indoor Stadium at Bambolim from November 8 to 10, 2024. Don’t ask me why but I found myself enjoying some of the charms of the high-powered summit (along with an expo of some 200 stalls showcasing what Goan business houses have to offer) where various members of Vibrant Goa Foundation led by Chairperson Rajkumar Kamat waxed lyrical over Goa is the ideal state for business people to call on to familiarize themselves with what Goa has to offer as well as the rest of India – as in come to Goa first before exploring the rest of India. Or come last to unwind in Goa! Goa is the pleasure state of the country, something like that, it offers the good life no other state does, something like that. See what Goa, the country’s tiny state has to offer too in the 21 century businesswise and pleasurewise.
Reportedly the first edition of this summit was enormously successful and that is why the non-profit Vibrant Goa Foundation folk decided to have it again to see if tourism driven Goa can attract more foreign investments. After all Goa offers the original West-East cosmopolitan blending courtesy its Portuguese colonial past history. It’s something few other states offer and English as the international language of business is well understood and spoken by most Goans.
Plus, look at the number of industrial estates Goa has with land enough for attracting more business investments, as Chief Minister Dr Pramod Sawant said at the inauguration. Goa will spread out the red carpet for eco-friendly business investments. Goa is already a luxury hospitality state but there’s room for other green business houses to boost the economy with mutual benefits. The summit was clearly organized with the blessings and bankrolling by the government of Goa, it would be interesting to find out how much was spent and if it was commensurate to business deals struck and who were the beneficiaries.
I’d partly spent some time out at the venue because the son of an old friend of my late father RB Patel (who’d migrated to Penang in Malaysia in the 1940s and I do have a brother living in Penang) was one of the delegates from Malaysia at the Amazing Goa Business Summit 2024. So I said hello Dato Taizoon Tyebkhan who is more or less familiar with India and he said he had come for the first summit. A warm, genial person, he shared with me that it was a very well organized summit and at the expo he was looking at industrial parts for his own business…he was all praise for the “buddy system” implemented, whereby he had access to a young Goan named Eben Morais and he clued him up about a lot of things about what, where, how while in Panjim for the summit. It was the best part of the business summit in Goa and he really appreciated this service. Apart from that he loved the food at the Double Tree by Hilton at the Kadamba Plateau where he was put up along with many of the other international delegates, “I think the largest number of delegates are from Malaysia.” He has relatives in India in Bombay and also in Goa, but yes, he does find Goa more expensive, and laughed that he had been instructed by his family to buy clothes from Bombay or Mumbai, “Mine is a Bohri Muslim family and we do have some special clothes which are better tailored by some Bombay tailoring shops!” He said it’s okay to make Goa a gateaway destination but there must be direct flights into Goa from Malaysia, “I had to come Penang-Kuala Lumpur-Chennai-Goa and that can be quite tiring especially if you have done some shopping. The national airline may permit you 50 kg but the international airline doesn’t, only 30 kg…”

A friendly young businessman is Dato Taizoon Tyebkhan and to my delight he greeted me in Gujarati; after all the Bohri Muslim community does have old links with Gujarat and India. He tells me he once the president of the Gujarati Samaj of Penang and my brother in Penang tells me Tyabkhan is a “Dato” which is a prestigious prefix granted by the government of Malaysia to influential businessmen, I was most amused that my brother Vijay Patel over WhatsApp message instructed me to address his friend as Dato Tyabkhan when I met him! But Taizoon is a unique name and I liked the sound of it and preferred to call him Dato Taizoon and he was fine with that. I am not sure he found what he was looking for at the Amazing Goa Business Summit exposition stalls…but I was amazed at the number of green technologies we have in Goa, and some of the delegates were taking a call on exporting such things as organic manure and gardening tools!
There were many delegates from the Middle East like Qatar and UAE but also Canada, USA, Bhutan, UK, and the European Union. Say about 300 delegates from 50 countries, that’s the official figure. I understand all the invitees paid for their travelling but hotel accommodation was courtesy the Amazing Goa Global Business Summit in collaboration with the government of Goa.
Plus, there were the dinners hosted and at the venue itself SUSEGAD Balcao had rigged up a lovely village courtyard set up, featuring bars, food stalls and local market where delegates could buy such piece de resistance items as may be a Kunbi saree (which is much promoted and one of the highlights was the razzmatazz exhibition of a long, long 102 meter long Kunbi saree to enter the Golden Book of World Records, courtesy Vibrant Goa Foundation and Oorja Training and Research Academy), exquisite pottery items, bamboo fabric towels, cosmetic jewelry and even some non-Goan Kashmiri shawls in a corner stall at! It was a lovely courtyard to unwind a bit after the day’s rounds of the exhibiting stalls was over. There was both coconut water and sugarcane juice on offer at marked-up pricing of course!
THIS is to say the per capita income in the country’s smallest state may be the highest and ever since the hippies discovered it as a beach paradise to unwind with a little marijuana in the 70s, there been no stopping Goa from being an international destination with more well-to-do foreigners preferring to leave their wintry months in the UK or Europe to holiday for a month or a few months in balmy sunshine-filled Goa.
Alas, post-Covid lockdowns however the high end foreign tourists prefer to travel east to the Cambodian countries and Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore are of course favourite holiday destinations. Thailand is no longer the old poor Thailand but has done itself proud…no matter how much money the government of Dr Pramod Sawant spends on entertaining business summits, the truth is Goa may be a tourist paradise for domestic tourists (who come all the way in honky tonky lorries from Benaras in Uttar Pradesh to do chath puja at Miramar beach, combining puja with desi-styled holiday in exotic Goa!). Goa is losing its charm in several respects.
Funny or not funny, the irony is that the only people making a beeline to Goa are real estate businessmen and one way or another way they do not care if Goa has adequate primary infrastructure in place vis-à-vis smoother, well-designed roadways (I don’t mean highways but internal urban streets and lanes) and of course one may not step out and hail a metered taxi to go anywhere one wishes to day or night…as my friend Dato Taizoon Tyabkhan says, Goa is more expensive than big city Mumbai! Despite two airports now there are no convenient direct international flights, they’re still hard to find…so?

I always say it’s a government’s job to make its own people happy with infrastructure first – power, water, public transport systems, public sanitation, not just five-star accommodation or fancy home-stays almost as expensive at 5-hotel stays – when all this comes the rest will automatically fall in place. There is always a rule book in life be it private or public life.
On that note it’s avjo, selamat datang, poite verem, au revoir, arrivedecci, hasta la vista and vachun yeta here for now. Think about all this and don’t just think!

—Mme Butterfly