The Hindu Business Line : Chennai — future financial hub?

This is no news to those who, like myself, have watched him over the years and been impressed by his quiet but result-oriented style of leadership and his efforts to give a push to ongoing schemes by monitoring their progress on the spot along with bo th officials and non-officials.

I learn that on such occasions, he listens patiently to those engaged in the execution of the schemes, and helps them with solutions to problems then and there.

At the start of his mayoralty of the Chennai Corporation, he set before himself the target of completing within his term nine flyovers at important but difficult locations. Many at the time considered it unattainable, but he proved them wrong.

Eight of them were fully functional well within the targeted time, and just when the ninth was to be commissioned, the Government changed, miring it in the notorious Indian malaise of successors undoing the works of predecessors just for the heck of it.

Firing people’s imagination

I think it necessary to dwell on Mr Stalin as the do-er because a politician cast in the mould of a competent and capable manager endowed with vision and dynamism is a rarity anywhere in the world, and particularly so in India.

No doubt the country as a whole, and Tamil Nadu, in particular, will stand to benefit from his flair for getting things done.

I only hope that he would not allow himself to be swallowed up by the kind of narrow, pernicious politics that has the State in its grip.

There is no idea so powerful as the one whose time has come, they say. Bold, visionary masterstrokes have a way of firing the people’s imagination and fusing their energies towards concrete achievement.

Chennai has a good model in Mumbai which is already the financial hub of the country.

The latter figures 10th (after London, New York, Chicago, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Seoul, Paris, Madrid and Milan) in the survey of the world’s biggest centres of commerce and finance flow hubs conducted by MasterCard Worldwide.

Compelling features

The ranking is based on an integration with equal weightage of five indicators — financial services network (signifying the presence and intensity of global banking institutions, insurance companies and global securities companies), and trading volumes in equity, bonds, derivatives and commodities.

Chennai has several compelling features going for it: It is the capital of a well-administered State known for its efficiency, discipline, labour productivity and work culture.

It has high quality physical and social infrastructure. It has emerged as the preferred destination for electronics and automobiles manufacture, and business process outsourcing. Japan and Korea especially are spreading the message of its irresistible appeal.

Turning Chennai into the country’s leading financial hub, as a prelude to helping it acquire a similar status on the global arena (and why not?) as well, is an eminently feasible proposition provided the groundwork is laid with meticulous attention by drawing on the knowledge and experience of top experts in the financial sector and the databases of the famed Wealth Management Institute in Singapore.

Financial services, in all their dimensions and with the needed reach, range and depth, cannot be established overnight.

The success of the hub hinges on access to capital, dependable and skilled professionals in IT-enabled services, accountancy and law, guarantee of financial stability, conducive business environment, facilitating and responsive governmental institutions and a fair but firm regulatory superstructure.

The Tamil Nadu Government should lose no time in setting up a multi-disciplinary Task Force for suggesting a roadmap to implement the idea within the shortest time possible.

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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