Karnataka industries minister R V Deshpande yesterday squarely blamed Union civil aviation and information & broadcasting minister C M Ibrahim for stalling the Rs 1,800-crore international airport project near Bangalore. The project is proposed to be constructed by a Tata Industries-led consortium.
``We are keen on the project and would like it to come up. The blame lies with the Centre, especially with C M Ibrahim. If it was not for him, the project would have definitely gone ahead, Deshpande told Business Standard here.
The minister was responding to a recent report in Fortune magazine, which criticised the Indian government for putting two major Indo-Singapore deals in cold storage. One was the proposed $700-million joint venture between Tata Industries and Singapore Airlines to create a 19-aircraft domestic airline and the second was the international airport project at Bangalore.
The consortium, consisting of Tata Industries, Singapores Changi Airport authority and the US-based Raytheon, had obtained clearance for the 1,800-crore project from the Union civil aviation ministry in 1992. However, present civil aviation minister C M Ibrahim objected to the project being set up on a build-own-operate (BOO) basis.
Ibrahim insisted that the project should instead be constructed on a build-own-operate-transfer (BOOT) basis, which was unacceptable to the consortium. A panel has since been set up to clear the impediments to the project.
In the Fortune report, Philip Yeo, the influential chairman of the Economic Development Board in Singapore, and an active participant in starting the Singapore Technology park in Whitefield, has complained, ``For every guy saying open the door, there is another saying close it.
Yeo also asked India to realise that ``foreign direct investment is a zero-sum game people dont wait, they go somewhere else.
