The Uttarakhand government has decided to introduce the state’s own SEZ Act and set up a special economic zone (SEZ) in the Sitarganj area of Kumaon.
For preparing the draft SEZ Bill, a four-member committee, headed by Additional Chief Secretary I K Pande, had been set up, official sources said here today.
The move came following a high-level meeting of the board of directors of the State Infrastructure and Industrial Development Corporation of Uttarakhand Ltd (SIDCUL) held here recently, which took up the matter regarding setting up an SEZ at Sitarganj town of Udham Singh Nagar district, where substantial land is available.
The meeting, which was supposed to give the nod to the proposed SEZ at Sitarganj, instead chose to set up the committee for drafting rules and modalities of the SEZ. Other members of the committee include Principal Secretary (Finance) Alok Jain, Secretary (Industries) P C Sharma and SIDCUL Managing Director Kunal Sharma.
The board felt the need to study SEZ rules in other states and adopt a suitable model for the hill state in the wake of SEZ controversies in West Bengal and elsewhere in the country. “Earlier experiences of special purpose vehicles (SPVs) and public-private partnership modes should also be taken into consideration,” said the board, which is headed by Chief Secretary S K Das.
Sources said since the board had felt the urgency of drafting the SEZ Bill first, the decision regarding setting up the SEZ at Sitarganj would be taken up later.
Besides the SEZ in Sitarganj, the government is also setting up an IT SEZ at Sahastradhara Road in Dehradun. Apart from this, private players like Parsvanath are also setting up a separate SEZ in the hill state.
Meanwhile, the new agri-policy in Uttarakhand, the draft Bill for which is ready now, has proposed a blanket ban on industrialisation and SEZs on farm land.
A committee comprising agricultural scientists, mainly from Pantnagar Agriculture University, has finalised the new agri-draft, which clearly states that there should be no industrialisation and development of SEZ projects on agriculture land as a large chunk of agri-land has fallen into the hands of land builders and industrialists in Uttarakhand during the past few years.
Tata Motors, along with some other top companies, has got highly fertile land in the recent past in Uttarakhand for setting up units, an issue that caused commotion among the agronomists in the state.
In this context, the government will now develop special agriculture zones (SAZs) to protect fertile land.
“We want to protect our agriculture, for which we want to bring SAZs in Uttarakhand,” an official said. But sources said the idea of an SAZ was not being mooted to replace the much contentious SEZs, an issue that created big problem in states like Goa, West Bengal and Orissa.
The government has also recently toughened laws pertaining to purchasing revenue land in the state by bringing amendment in the present laws.
