Maharashtra is open for business, said chief minister Eknath Shinde at the Economic Times Awards for Corporate Excellence on Friday, inviting corporates to invest in the state as it has good infrastructure and connectivity as well as skilled manpower.

He assured them of speedy approvals. Several projects that are underway will transform Maharashtra and ensure its future growth.

“There are several key infrastructure projects in the state like the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link, the coastal road, the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project, the Mumbai-Delhi expressway — all these projects were languishing during the earlier government,” he said.

“For two and half years (under the previous Maha Vikas Aghadi) all these projects had come to a standstill.”

Accusing the MVA government of being gripped by policy paralysis, Shinde said that in the nine months his government has been in power in the state along with the Bharatiya Janata Party, it’s removed bottlenecks in infrastructure projects.

“We have completed the first phase of the Hinduhriday samrat Balasaheb Thackeray Nagpur-Mumbai Samruddhi Expressway. The second phase of the expressway will also be completed soon,” the chief minister said.

“We have completed two new metro lines in Mumbai and in the next two to three years we would have 350 kilometres of new metro rails in the Mumbai metropolitan region.” Shinde said that the state has been attracting a number of investment proposals from within the country and abroad.“When we went to Davos for the World Economic Forum, we signed MoUs worth `1.37 lakh crore,” he said.

“We have begun work on several of these projects.” To give a push to the goal of becoming a $1 trillion economy by FY26, Shinde said the state has formed a new economic advisory body, the Maharashtra Institution for Transformation (MITRA), on the lines of the NITI Aayog.