On February 25, 2025, Union Home Minister Amit Shah closed Madhya Pradesh’s Global Investors Summit in Bhopal by announcing that MoUs worth Rs 30.77 lakh crore had been signed at the two-day event, more than seven times the state’s budget for 2025-26. 

He had full faith, he said, that most of them would bear fruit.

Speaking from the same stage, Chief Minister Mohan Yadav widened the claim. “We have signed MoUs worth Rs 30.77 lakh crore during the two-day Global Investors Summit and some Regional Industrial Conclaves,” he said, referring to seven smaller investor meets held in the months before.

By February 2026, the government was telling the assembly there had been no MoUs for industry at all. 

Answering Congress MLA Vikrant Bhuria, Yadav’s reply said “not a single MoU had been signed” at the summits between 2020 and February 2026 for setting up industries. What the state had, it said, were “investment intent proposals” filed online with the Madhya Pradesh Industrial Development Corporation (MPIDC), the state agency that runs the summits.

And now, the MPIDC seems to have given the number yet another description. 

The Rs 30.77 lakh crore, its managing director, Chandramouli Shukla, told Newslaundry in response to questions, is the “total of intentions to invest, proposals received by departments and agreements signed with public agencies, announced as received” between the 2023 summit, held under the previous chief minister, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, and the 2025 one under Yadav. 

Shukla said it adds up intents filed online, at the seven regional events, at interactive sessions, foreign roadshows, proposals received by state departments during the summit, and agreements signed between government bodies and government-owned companies. “In public communication it was referred to by the general term MoUs,” he wrote.

Bigger than this terminological sleight of hand is the entities that made it to the list.

Newslaundry accessed and examined the list of investment proposals that were mentioned in Yadav’s February reply. Its biggest entry, worth Rs 3 lakh crore, is from a company set up less than eight months before the summit, which ended its first year with Rs 10,556 in cash and bank balances.