Peerless Group plans huge expansion by 2010

Kolkata, Oct 27: Peerless General Finance and Investment Company Limted, India's leading NBFC with a capital base of over Rs 5,000 crores, has decided to foray into tourism, hospitality and some other sectors in a big way with a total investment of more than Rs 1,200 crores in next five years.

This was announced here last night by Peerless Managing Director S.K.Roy while speaking at the inauguration of the year-long Platinum Jubilee celebration of the organisation in presence of Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee and Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacherjee and a host of other dignitaries.

Elaborating his expansion and diversification programme Mr Roy said apart from adding Rs 1,000 crores in the present asset base of the company they were planning to venture into the Mutual Fund business, besides tourism and hospitality sectors in a big way.

"In the tourism sector alone we plan to invest about Rs 500 crores within the next five years in terms of creating infrastructural support and the accomodation facilities," Mr Roy said adding that Peerless was also planning to set up a number of star hotels in different parts of the country and bring them under one chain of hotels to attract more tourists both from home and abroad.

"We are also exploring the opportunity to make greater inroads in the health sector and plan to set up a number of private hospitals in different areas, including the semi urban areas. While majority of them would cater to poor patients, some of them would be for the elite classes too with state of the art facilities," Mr Roy informed.

The first of such hospital would come up at Santiniketan near Bolpur within the next week and would be inaugurated by Mr Somnath Chatterjee.

He said under a special project initiative called "Hitoishi", all out efforts would be made to create about 14,500 job opportunities for the local youths and under various self-help groups through several time bound programmes.

Peerless as part of its Corporate Social Responsibility had decided to develop two major slums in North and South Kolkata under which it would spend more than Rs two crores each, Mr Roy informed.

He also donated Rs five lakhs to the Chief minister's Relief Fund.

Later speaking on the occasion both the Chief minister and the Lok Sabha Speaker hailed the 'good work' being done by the organisation for the past seven decades and their efforts to create more employment opportunities for the young generation.

Since we are against the jobless growth under the present market economic structure, such attempts to create huge job opportunities particulary in micro-credit sectors and small enterprises are heartilty welcomed by us, Mr Bhattacherjee said in his brief speech.

He said though the state government was for the industrial rejuvination programme, it was against the jobless growth under national economic programmes where the scope of employment was reportedly being reduced by four per cent this year.

Among others CPI-M MP Mohammad Salim and Peerlees Chairman Dipankar Basu, also the former Chairman of SBI were present.

UNI