The government would soon create a land bank of 25,000 acres to facilitate setting up of industries on the corridor, the CM said

“It would promote indigenisation and support the Make in India initiative, helping meet equipment requirements worth over $250 billion by 2025. It would also promote ancillarisation and development of MSMEs for the Aerospace & Defence (A&D) sector, making UP a preferred destination for the purpose and boosting India’s defence exports,” says a UPEIDA official.

At the recently concluded DefExpo 2020 in Lucknow, 23 companies signed MoUs worth Rs 50,000 crore with the state government for investment in the defence corridor. At the event, Ancor Research Labs became the first investor in the corridor, being allotted 25 acres of land in the Aligarh node to create high-end defence testing facilities and manufacture defence grade communication systems.

Speaking after presenting the state’s budget for 2020-21 more recently, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said the project would serve as a springboard for the state turning into a $1-trillion economy by 2024, as the government had proposed. The government would soon create a land bank of 25,000 acres to facilitate setting up of industries on the corridor, the CM said. “UP’s aim is to become a net exporter; even if half of the MoUs that were signed at the DefExpo are realised, we will be able to generate employment for 2.5 lakh people,” he said.

Among the investment avenues on the corridor are defence parks at Jhansi, Agra, and Kanpur; aerospace parks at Lucknow, Kanpur, and Agra; leather and textile hubs at Agra; and engineering/electronics manufacturing hubs at Agra, Kanpur, Gautam Buddha Nagar and Ghaziabad. To attract investors, the UP government has offered major incentives in its Defence & Aerospace Policy 2018, including reimbursement of 25% of land cost, transportation subsidy, and reimbursement of 75% of the cost of technology transfer to anchor units. It has roped in IIT-BHU and IIT-Kanpur as knowledge partners to conduct research and help train manpower for industrial units in the defence sector.