NR

NRIs return to Punjab to set up shop-and create wealth for the state

Sons Of Fortune
India Today
By Ramesh Vinayak, MAY 05, 2003

When London-based hotelier Jagpal Singh Khangura returned to his home state Punjab in 1990 to build a hotel, the state government was incredulous, even discouraging. Punjab was wracked by terrorism and real-estate prices were rock bottom. The then governor S.S. Ray even advised him to invest the money in a hospital instead. But Khangura was unyielding and bought a prime piece of land in Ludhiana, the state's industrial capital. A Rs 110-crore investment and over a decade later, Punjab's first five-star hotel, the Park Plaza, was commissioned in January last year.

"It's an investment guided by instinct to keep in touch with my roots," says 65-year-old Khangura, who left a low-paid teaching job to emigrate to a recession-hit Britain in the early 1960s. Beginning with odd jobs-driver, tea blender, postman-he finally bought a street cafe in Southall in 1966 and turned it into a £100 million hospitality business. Today, he has named the Rs 12,000-a-night presidential suite in his 150-room hotel "Latala suite" after his ancestral village. He may be a British citizen, but Ludhiana is the first home for him and his wife Gurdial Kaur. "Doing business here is more gratifying. It allows me to do something for the people of India," says Khangura who also plans to set up a Rs 40-crore dairy unit in his village.

Khangura represents the new crop of NRI wealthmakers in Punjab who are driven not so much by nostalgia as the passion to replicate their success stories back home. They are the forerunners of a trend that augurs well for a state with meagre NRI investments. In the past decade, the NRI investment in the industrial sector was less than Rs 200 crore against proposals of Rs 700 crore, even though there are roughly two million expatriates of Punjabi origin abroad.

These are the first-generation emigrants who ventured abroad seeking better opportunities and ended up creating incredible rags-to-riches stories. Their keen business sense is now pulling them back home. Drawn by the advantages of doing business in post-liberalisation India, they are extending their core strengths to Punjab.

Khangura's son, Jasbir Singh Jassi, agrees. "India allows you to implement ideas much faster than anywhere else." So, one of the floors of the family hotel has his Rs 10-crore software company that designs education content for British schools. And in order to beat bureaucratic hurdles, NRI magnates are using their business ventures to cultivate clout. "I did not have to shell out a single penny as bribe," says Khangura, who doesn't hide the family's political ambitions as a corollary to its business success. His wife contested the previous assembly elections as the Congress nominee and has since been nursing her constituency.

Despite the state Government's attempts to woo entrepreneurs with off-the-shelf industrial plots and single-window clearances, many investors still perceive business enterprise as risky and feel more at ease putting their money in real estate. In the past eight years, NRI investments in real estate have been pegged at Rs 1,000 crore-a key factor in the buoyant property prices across the state. "It is the safest bet," says Major Singh Sahota, who has shifted from Vancouver to Jalandhar and invested Rs 7 crore in a shopping plaza. "I am getting a safe return while bringing up my children in the culture that we were missing abroad," he says.

khangura’s elder son is 38-year-old and married to the grand daughter of partap singh kairon, ex chief minister of punjab, while her younger son is also married and settled, which is probably a many years away from schooling and college.

In 2002, at 64, Gurdial Kaur Khangura is more an adoring grandmother than a politician. She has left London, where she has spent the better part of her life, to contest as the Congress candidate from Kila Raipur, a seat the party has never won. A political novice, Khangura is counting on the Rs 15 lakh spent on community work in the area by her husband, who owns a £100-million (Rs 680 crore) business in England...

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