More incentives for companies going to backward districts
The Andhra Pradesh government is working on a new industrial policy to give thrust to the manufacturing sector. The government is contemplating district-specific incentives for investors in line with its objective of taking industries to interior villages to provide employment to the locals.
In other words, companies going to districts like Mahaboobnagar, Kurnool, Adilabad and other industrially backward places will get more incentives than those wanting to set up industries closer to urban areas.
“Incentives will be linked to employment generation,” industries principal secretary B Sam Bob told Business Standard.
The government is in favour of relaxing land use norms in some districts. The companies will be free to use some part of the land for commercial development. “Companies cannot come up in jungles. They need habitations,” he said.
The state government will send teams to Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka to understand the incentives offered by the respective governments to attract investments. It will leverage nearly 500,000 graduates, including 210,000 engineers, that the state produces every year for meeting the manpower requirements.
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Sam Bob said they would continue to extend power at a special rate. The state had reimbursed 75 paise during the first year of the last policy and has been regulating the price on a yearly basis to make it affordable to the industry.
The strategy, like during the last policy, will be to create quality infrastructure, encourage exports, attract mega investments, foster industrial clusters, prevent migration and permit industries to exit. Andhra Pradesh is the fifth largest state accounting for 8.4 per cent of India’s territory with about 80 million population. It has the longest 972 km coastline in the country. The industrial sector contributes 13 to 15 per cent to the gross state domestic product.
“A clutch of power projects are coming up here to make it a power surplus state,” he said. The industries department is also in talks with APTranco, the state-owned power transmission company, for setting up separate feeders to ensure quality power to the industries.
Sam Bob said the government would shift some industries to the interior villages for meeting pollution norms. It would also not allow new units or expansion of the existing ones in districts that are saturated.
“The multiplier effect of port-based industries and the proposed Petroleum, Chemicals and Petrochemicals Investment Region apart from the K-G basin gas finds will trigger a lot of ancillary units to create vast employment,” he said. Pharma, textiles, power, paper, cement, granite and agritech would attract most investments.
The present industrial investment policy, formed in 2005, expires on March 31, 2010.
The government introduced a single-window clearance facility for the first time in the country and envisaged increasing the exports share from the state from 4.39 per cent to 10 per cent by 2010.