Group to track stalled projects

About 40 stuck projects may be cleared by next month

To boost investor confidence, the Prime Minister has set up a group to track large investment projects which are stuck due to want of various approvals. It is expected that up to 40 stuck projects would be cleared by next month.

Finance Minister P Chidambaram said a list of about 215 such projects had been compiled, where banks had lent about Rs 7 lakh crore.

The time and cost overruns had been documented, with the action required to remove the implementation bottlenecks.

While clearing some of the hurdles is in the domain of regulatory authorities at the central level, a large number of impediments are in the domain of state governments and local bodies.

A meeting was chaired by the Prime Minister earlier this month to discuss an institutional mechanism to track stalled investment projects in both the public and private sectors and to get these moving. He directed that a cell be created in the cabinet secretariat in the form of a monitoring group for all large projects, public and private, a government statement said here today.

Chidambaram said at a press conference that the approach will be to get some early harvest. "We will identify 20-30-40 projects that are nearing COD (commencement operation date)," he said.

The ministry of environment and forests has an online portal where the status of all projects sent for clearance could be tracked. The list had been significantly reduced, the statement added.

Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman, Planning Commission, said the institutional mechanism mentioned here should get going at the earliest and 20-30 major projects chosen across sectors for speedy resolution. This would be a confidence booster to investment sentiment and signal the government's seriousness on the issue, he said.

The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry has given a list of 52 projects in the private sector, with investment of a little over Rs 1,000 crore, delayed due to various bottlenecks.

The cabinet secretariat has also prepared a CCI Projects Tracking System portal for tracking projects of over Rs 1,000 crore.

The Cabinet Committee on Investment is already examining such big-size projects.

INFRA PUSH

• 215 large projects indentified as stuck due to approval issues
• Rs 7 lakh crore given to these projects by banks
• 52 projects listed by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry
• Rs 1,000 crore worth investment stuck in these projects
• Rs 1,000 crore worth projects to be tracked by online CCI Projects Tracking System
• Regulatory issues in way of some projects
• Lack of clearances from states and local bodies major reason for stalling others
• Time and cost overruns and action required documented