Anand Sharma calls meet to discuss pending projects

NEW DELHI: Reacting to the Prime Minister's Office's directive on the need for strict monitoring of large-scale projects of national importance, commerce and industry minister Anand Sharma has scheduled a meeting to review the status of all pending projects with the industry department.

Top officials from the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion will help the minister to identify a number of key projects that the PMO could monitor directly. Sharma, who will be back from his Davos and Paris visit on Wednesday, is expected to hold the meeting later in the week.

"The ministry has taken the PMO's directions seriously and will do the needful as soon as possible," a government official told ET.

The PMO has identified monitoring of large scale projects as one of the thrust areas that needs immediate action. It wants to monitor such projects directly and has asked the commerce and industry ministry to identify these within a month.

The DIPP has been concerned about the slow progress in a number of projects which not only includes high-profile ones like South Korean steel giant Posco's proposed investment in Orissa or the Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor project, but also local ones under the industrial infrastructure upgradation scheme or IIUS that also creates employment.

In a recent stock taking meeting of projects funded under the IIUS, it was reported that of the 31 projects sanctioned up to March 2010, only 14 were complete and the remaining were running behind schedule.