Narayana Murthy opposes SEZ policy

Software icon N R Narayana Murthy today said he is opposed to the practice of acquiring farmland for special economic zones (SEZs) saying that the earlier practice of companies building their own campuses was good enough.

"I agree that we cannot take land from farmers", the non-executive chairman & chief mentor of Infosys Technologies told reporters who sought his views on the raging debate over SEZs.

"The earlier policy where individual companies were building their own campuses was a good one," he said adding that bringing real estate players in between was probably not the best thing to do.

Murthy, the face of India's booming IT industry, added: "That's why all this furore has been created. I think the earlier policy of requesting companies to deal directly to get land and build their own campuses is a good one".

He said that the recent Nandigram incident in West Bengal, where 14 people were killed in police firing during a protest, is likely to have "some repercussions".

"At the end of the day, let us remember that news travels through the Internet pretty quickly, and people all over the world will read it and perhaps, in some ways, some of them will misinterpret it. So, in that sense, there is always a danger of some repercussions", he added.