State has already cleared 63 SEZs

MUMBAI: The Maharashtra government has decided not to clear any more Special Economic Zone (SEZ) proposals. While the government has cited various reasons for the move, there is also the burning political question. MPs and MLAs can ignore the resentment among the rural constituency only at their own peril.

Recently, the police lathi-charged a group of farmers at Hinjewadi near Pune, when an agitation against SEZs turned violent. Hinjewadi will be home to three SEZs, all requiring huge chunks of land. Ministers belonging to Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party are at the forefront of battle against SEZs.

Chhagan Bhujbal, minister for public works department, and RR Patil, the home minister, are fiercely opposed to granting any more clearances to SEZs. Incidentally, Maharashtra was the first state to come up with its own SEZ policy, and it had also introduced an Act to attract more such ‘growth engines’.

The Act offered concessions, including easy land acquisitions, which quickly became a bone of contention. Now that the Maharashtra government has stopped granting approvals, will other states follow suit? According to official statistics released by the Centre last week, Maharashtra heads the SEZ chart with 63 proposals, followed by Haryana with 54.

Other prominent contenders are Andhra Pradesh, with 53 proposals; Karnataka, with 51; and Tamil Nadu, with 42 proposals. Of the 63 proposals from the state, about 18 have been cleared by the Centre. Of these five are for IT, three for pharma, four for textiles, two for auto and one each for biotechnology, agro and multi-services.

There is one multi-product zone too. The largest of them will be Reliance’s MahaMumbai SEZ, which will gobble up 35,000 acres of land near Mumbai.