Uttarakhand clears new industrial proposals

After a long wait, the Uttarakhand government has quietly cleared 25-26 proposals from the industries for the purpose of expansions and new manufacturing facilities in the state.

State Industries Minister Bansidhar Bhagat confirmed the development and said the state would receive an investment of over Rs 400-500 crore through these proposals.

Initially, the government had received over 60 proposals from industries to set up new units or go for substantial expansion in the state. But after the expiry of cent percent excise duty exemption, a key component of the concessional industrial package (CIP) 2003 in March, the response to buy land reduced considerably. “Less than 50 per cent of the applicants finally showed interest in buying industrial plots,” a source close to the development said.

ITC was the main beneficiary under the new allotment as it got nearly 8-9 acres of land at the industrial estate of Haridwar. The sources said barring ITC, most of the other industries are not so prominent.

These industries had submitted proposals to the State Infrastructure and Industrial Development Corporation of Uttarakhand Limited (SIDCUL), a nodal agency for industrial development, to buy land at industrial estates of Pantnagar and Haridwar as well as at Pharma City and Sigaddi Growth Centre at Kotdwar. All these industrial estates have been developed by SIDCUL where over 1,500 industries including top companies like Tata Motors, Nestle and HUL had set up units during the past few years with an investment entailing more than '16,000 crores.

Most of these industries had got land between 300 sq meter to 1,000 sq meter in the four industrial areas. The main rush was for Haridwar and Pantnagar where 32 acres and 75 acres of land was vacant. But most of the new proposals are only for Haridwar. For the rest of the industrial estates, there was hardly any interest shown by the industries.

Technically, the proposals should have been put before the empowered committee headed by the Industries Minister, who is its chairman. But since all the files related to these proposals were lying in the office of Chief Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank for clearance, Bhagat was finding it difficult to make any intervention.

But following a lot of pressure from certain quarters, the government finally cleared the new proposals without making any announcement.