Greetings!

The South Indian Peninsula is a land of amazing possibilities and endless opportunities endowed with the natural beauty of majestic mountain ranges, long coastlines with lovely beaches, powerful rivers and bountiful natural resources. South India is well placed to lead the India’s growth to become a $5 Trillion Economy. It is ideally positioned to be the growth engine of India and has the most diversified economy - Manufacturing, Agriculture & Food Processing, The Blue Economy, Leather, Apparels, Light & Heavy Engineering, ICT, Entertainment and many more. South India pioneered knowledge based sectors, new / renewable energy, biotechnology, defense and aerospace. Industry 4.0, AI and quantum computing are new growth areas innovated here.

However, the intrinsic strengths of the South have remained unexplored by investors, both domestic and global. This is despite South contributing close to 30% of India’s GDP. With this background, we felt it was necessary to showcase and highlight the potential of South as an ideal and preferred destination for investments in the plentiful offerings available in this region.

‘Mystic South - Gateway to Prosperity’, is an attempt to provide you with credible data and capture the best of all the Southern States - their economy, infrastructure, quality of life, key policies, business competitiveness and emerging opportunities. The idea is to give investors a birds eye view of the South - a starting point in their journey towards prosperity. While we realize that a lot more detailing and in-depth analysis is necessary to arrive at conclusive decisions, our hope is that this booklet will provide the impetus to start this search.

This booklet will reach the Potential Investors, Diplomats, Honorary Consuls, Trade Attaches, Heads of Fraternal Organizations & Bilateral Chambers, CII members across the country and its MoU partners around the world.

Mystic South was possible only through the hard work and dedication of an amazing set of Members – Prasanna Rajagopalan, P Madhavan, A K Tareen, S Narasimhan, Suresh Raman, Deepak Ramaswamy and Yashwanth Venkatraman, supported by our outstanding secretariat.

While we have done our best to authenticate and validate all primary and secondary data through government sources, global data banks, national and international experts, organizations and of course, our own CII, errors of omission / commission may be kindly excused and will be corrected in subsequent updates.

In conclusion, we present to you the Hidden Gem of the Indian Sub- Continent!

Welcome to the Mystic South - Gateway to Prosperity!!

T T Ashok
Chairman, International Linkages Sub-Committee
CII Southern Region