 "National Industrial Corridor Development Authority on anvil")
"We will be approaching the Cabinet by the end of this month with the proposal to set up NICDA," a senior official from the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, which would administer the authority, told Business Standard.
The body will have a financial corpus of Rs 19,000 crore and it will be headed by a CEO. It will also be entrusted with the work of planning and designing of the corridors.
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The government has so far conceptualised five economic corridors: Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC), Bengaluru- Mumbai Economic Corridor (BMEC), Chennai-Bengaluru Industrial Corridor (CBIC), Visakhapatnam-Chennai Industrial Corridor (VCIC) and Amritsar-Kolkata Industrial Corridor (AKIC).
According to the plan, out of the Rs 19,000-crore corpus, around Rs 2,000 crore will be allowed for four industrial corridors and the rest will be set aside for DMIC.
Work on DMIC got delayed and it has now reached the take-off stage, said the official cited above.
"The state governments through which these corridors are passing have all been asking from us for clear terms of reference under the special purpose vehicles (SPV) that are going to be soon established," he said.
This is an expensive project so the government has decided to keep the highest possible funds for this corridor, the official added.
Except for the funding part, the DMIC will not be administered by the NICDA. The body's main function will be planning and designing of the other four corridors in terms of creation of investment zones, special economic zones and industrial parks.
Recently, commerce minister Nirmala Sitharaman had said in the Rajya Sabha that BMEC, VCIC and AKIC are in the initial stages of implementation, whereas master planning for all the three nodes in CBIC and all nodes except for 'Dadri-Noida-Ghaziabad' Investment region under DMIC has been completed.
The DMIC covers six states including, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra. BMEC will cover Karnataka and Maharashtra, while the CBIC is expected to cover Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.
On the other hand, the VCIC plans to include only Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Lastly, the AKIC is expected to run though seven states - Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal.