Include states in industrial corridor panel: Akhilesh Yadav to Centre

LUCKNOW: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav today said that the states included in a railways industrial corridor plan should be made a part of an inter -ministerial panel set up to finalise the project.

"The Centre has (okayed) the Amritsar-Delhi-Kolkata industrial corridor, parallel to the eastern dedicated freight corridor.

"As this corridor passes through UP (among other states), it should be (included) in the inter-ministerial committee," Yadav told reporters here.

The corridor will cover the states of Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal.

Yadav said that the proposed corridor would be 1,840-km long with 1,049-km of the project set to pass through the UP districts of Saharanpur, Muzaffarnagar, Meerut, Ghaziabad, GB Nagar, Firozabad, Etawah, Kanpur, Fatehpur, Allahabad, Mirzapur and Chandauli.

A total of six zones would be formed as part of the industrial corridor, Yadav said, adding that his government had in April written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with the suggestion that such an industrial corridor be set up.

Handloom, carpet, food processing, fertiliser, thermal plant, cement and steel industries would receive a boost due to the proposed corridor, Yadav said.

The PM had on June 7 given his nod to the plan and set up an inter-ministerial panel to prepare the feasibility report for the same.

This is the second such project after the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC), which is currently under development.