| While the government has ambitious plans from the new SEZ policy, in terms of the investment and employment that they will deliver "" $23 bn by 2009 "" the past experience of SEZs has been quite dismal. Aradhna Aggarwal of ICRIER has done a paper examining the track record of such export processing zones in the sub-continent and found that even though India was an early beginner, its SEZs have performed poorly. By 2003, Bangladesh, which began much later, got $750 million into SEZs as compared to India's $388 mn "" by this period, SEZs in India employed under 90,000 people as compared to 145,000 in Bangladesh and 105,000 in Sri Lanka. By 2003, under a fourth of this investment in India was from FDI versus over 80 per cent for both Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. |
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