India’s Best CEOs 2025 awards: Uttar Pradesh will continue to grow, says Additional Chief Secretary Alok Kumar

The success story of Uttar Pradesh, a state with a population of 24 crore, is one that needs to be told, Alok Kumar, Additional Chief Secretary, Infrastructure & Industrial Development Department, MSME & Export Promotion, and NRI Affairs, the Government of Uttar Pradesh, said on Monday at Fortune India’s Best CEOs 2025 awards in Mumbai.

“UP is a growth story that needs to be told, and we should try to sell it to businesspeople,” Kumar said. On the reasons behind Uttar Pradesh’s success story, Kumar enumerated four pillars. First comes safety—to make the investors feel safe. Then comes the infrastructure—the metros, the airports, and the expressways, among others. The third pillar is governance, the ease of doing business, and how the investors are treated. The final pillar is the policy environment—the attractiveness of a state in the eyes of the investors.

“On all four counts, we have done fairly well…in 2015, UP was registering 500 factories a year. In 2023-24, we registered 3,100 factories. This year, we will be looking at 6,000 factories. The growth is not linear, but almost exponential,” said Kumar. He added that UP has doubled its GDP and per capita income in the past seven years. “We are not going to stop here, but only grow.”

Kumar also dispelled the popular notion that Uttar Pradesh is an agrarian state. “UP has 96 lakh MSME units. In a state of 24 crore, that makes it one unit operating in every five families,” Kumar said, adding that the state always had a strong base of industry, citing the brass industry in Moradabad and the leather industry in Kanpur and Agra as examples.

He also conceded that the services sector in Uttar Pradesh needs improvement, which is why the state has introduced a new GCC policy. He added that NCR, particularly Noida and Greater Noida, has always benefited in terms of the services sector.

“As of now, if you look at the GCC policy, and if you benchmark it with the rest of the states, it is one of the best policies. Currently, we are marketing two cities. One is the expanded Noida, the Yamuna area where the new airport is coming up. The other is Lucknow, which I think is an underrated city. It is another city that we are positioning,” added Kumar, citing that companies like IBM, HDFC and Deloitte have already set up offices in the city. “Noida already has a large electronics ecosystem, so that can be integrated with the GCC setup.”

Kumar ended the discussion by calling Uttar Pradesh a state of ‘continental dimensions’, with a young demographic and a large market. “The ones who are going to miss out, UP will not be the loser,” he concluded.