Britain to help develop Kolkata as financial hub

Kolkata (IANS): Britain will assist West Bengal in improving infrastructure, capacity building and modernisation of markets in Kolkata to develop the capital city as a financial hub.

‘I am here to see how we can help develop your wonderful city into a financial hub,’ Lord Mayor of London Michael Bear told mediapersons after holding talks with state Commerce and Industry Minister Partha Chatterjee and Finance Minister Amit Mitra at the state secretariat here.

Bear, who led a delegation of experts, said Britain will look at all range of infrastructure development needs of the city - from delivering roads and maintaining roads to airport and riverside development.  ‘And also to look at your markets, how you can improve your markets, make them more modern while retaining the heritage that is so important in your city,’ he said.

‘I hope we will now be able to write down all these wonderful milestones that we have been talking about, with the memorandum of understanding, to determine a route plan to make Kolkata one of the centres of corners of industry and finance,’ he said.

At another programme earlier, Bear said: ‘A brake on growth is the lack of sophisticated capital markets.’