IL
Kolkata, May 19 (UNI) The Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Service (IL&FS) today disclosed an innovative measure to ease congestion along the border-trade areas.
Speaking at a seminar on 'Indo-Bangladesh Trade', Senior Manager of the IL&FS Corporation Ltd Subhabrata Haldar said, ''We are planning to build the Indian Check-Post (ICP) on Public-Private Partnership (PPP) basis.'' Elaborating on the trade arrangements with Bangladesh, Myanmar, Pakistan and China, Mr Haldar said 60 per cent of the country's exports to Bangladesh was through land and the average truck movement was 300 per day.
According to Mr Haldar, the cost of building ICP in Petrapole border in West Bengal was Rs 180 crore, Rs 125 crore in Raxaul in Bihar, Rs 100 crore along Wagah in Punjab and Rs 130 crore along Moreh in Manipur.
Mr Haldar stated that for the proposed check-post, the IL&FS had sought cooperation from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA).
''The Steering Committee for the project is being headed by the MEA. We hope the MEA will settle the bilateral issues with the concerned countries,'' he said.
Higlighting the project, Managing Director, Logistics Plus India Pvt Ltd, S L Ganapathi said road transport in India was basically 'internally-looking'. ''Despite the surge in Sino-India trade, as a Supply-Chain Practitioner, I feel warehousing along the border needs to be modernised,'' he opined.
Mr Haldar stated that bilateral trade deficit needed to be reduced in order to increase the current trade along the Petrapole border and therefore the IL&FS had decided to set up banks and other financial institutions along the border to ease the bottlenecks in physical infrastructure and procedural hazards that delayed transportation.
He informed that the IL&FS had also earmarked the land requirements for the proposed ICP ''For Category 'A' which will include the Wagah and Petrapole borders, it is 45 hectares, for Category 'B'(Raxaul), it is 18 hectares, while for Category 'C', it is nine hectares,'' Mr Haldar added.
The land acquisition process had already started in Punjab and Bihar. However, they were yet to approach the West Bengal government, he said.
According to the proposed PPP funding pattern, the government would supply the land and private sector would provide several facilities in the form of Build Operate Transfer (BOT) and the Engineering Procurement Construction (EPC).
UNI


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