Investors for Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor cities by August

The first anchor investors for the smart cities to be developed along the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) will be finalised by August this year, the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor Development Corp (DMIDC) said on Tuesday.

DMIDC made the announcement here at a seminar on the industrial corridors planned in India at the ongoing Make in India Week event here.

DMIC is a hi-tech industrial zone planned across seven states along a 1,500 km long Western Dedicated Freight Corridor, and includes 24 industrial regions, eight smart cities, two airports, five power projects, two mass Rapid Transit Systems and two logistical hubs, DMIDC said.

The four other proposed industrial zones are the Bangalore-Mumbai Economic Corridor, the Amritsar-Kolkata Industrial Corridor, the Chennai-Vishakapatnam Industrial Corridor and the Chennai-Bengaluru Industrial Corridor.

Speaking at the seminar, Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion Secretary Amitabh Kant described the DMIC as being benchmarked with the world's best, with top class planning and detailed engineering.

"Today, it takes 14 days for goods to reach the ports in west India from the north. The corridor will be ready in 2018, and goods will reach the ports in 14 hours," Kant said.

Addressing a separate industry-academia symposium at the event, Kant said filing and getting approvals for patents will become easier and faster in India with these coming in as quickly as 18 months - a process will be enabled within a year.

"We will also outsource some of this work to the Indian Institutes of Technology. Apart from that, we are also hiring few hundred officers to inspect new patent applications and approve them quickly," he said.