Board meeting on SEZs set for February 2

After postponing two meetings earlier this month, the Board of Approval (BoA) for special economic zones (SEZs) will finally meet on February 2 to discuss and approve various pending issues related to 63 notified SEZs, Commerce Secretary Gopal Pillai told Business Standard today.

The meeting will be held against the backdrop of the recent decision by the Empowered Group of Ministers (EGoM) to stop fresh approval and notification of SEZs other than the ones already notified.

The notified SEZs are expected to garner investments of Rs 58,000 crore and create 8.9 lakh jobs by 2008.

The two postponed BoA meetings were scheduled to consider 81 proposals. These are now likely to be taken up by the BoA after the group of ministers takes a final decision on issues like land acquisition, rehabilitation, tax evasion by SEZ units and setting a ceiling on the number of zones. The date of the next meeting by the EGoM has not been finalised.

The issues that are expected to come up in the February 2 board meeting include giving clearances to co-developers for the notified zones, approval to special purpose vehicles as developers of zones and the final formalities to enable SEZ developers to start construction in the notified area.

Major zones notified in December-January 2006-07 include the electronics- and telecommunications hardware-specific State Industries Promotion Corporation of Tamil Nadu SEZ (189.77 hectares), ONGC's multi product Dahej SEZ (1718 hectare), Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation's aluminum products SEZ (118.13 hectare) in Aurangabad, and FAB city's semiconductor specific zone (120.6 hectare) in Ranga Reddy district, Andhra Pradesh

So far, 237 SEZs have been given formal approval, which includes the 63 notified SEZs.

In addition, the BoA has already given "in-principle" clearances to 164 zones while the commerce ministry has 300 fresh proposals. According to the latest available data, there are 22 functional SEZs which recorded exports worth Rs 22,500 crore in 2005-06 and generated 1.8 lakh jobs.