)
Finance Minister P Chidambaram today said over 340 projects are held up for some reasons or the other and expressed his commitment to remove bottlenecks hampering their implementation.
"We are sitting with the bankers and the industry to find out why a particular project has been stalled and I am noting that down. I will try to remove that block," he told reporters after meeting bankers here.
As many as 341 projects, including 125 new projects, are held up for some reasons or the other, the Minister said, adding, "the agenda (of the meeting with bankers) was to identify the projects that have been stalled".
These projects, Chidambaram said, was held up on account of issues like land acquisition, gas or coal linkages, environmental clearances, forest clearances and in some cases the inability or the unwillingness of the bank to restructure the loans.
"These are four or five reasons and these apply to all the projects. We have to deal with them project by project", the Minister said, adding he would undertake a similar exercise in Chennai shortly.
Worried over the growing number of stalled projects, the government had set up a high-powered Cabinet Committee on Investment (CCI), under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, to remove bottlenecks hampering mega projects.
The CCI this month is expected to ease stringent conditions imposed by Defence Ministry on 31 other oil and gas blocks, Chidambaram had said.
"CCI will meet in April. We will try to take up 31 oil and gas projects for clearance. Ministry of Defence and Oil Ministry, DRDO and others have sorted out the problem," he had said last week.
