Board of Approval to meet on SEZs on Feb 25

New Delhi, Feb 8: The board of approval (BoA) for special economic zones (SEZ) headed by Commerce Secretary G K Pillai will meet here on February 25.

Though the Commerce and Industry Ministry has not issued the agenda of the BoA meet, yet it is understood that it could among other things take up the case of multi-product SEZs like that of Reliance Industries' which is slated to come up in Jhajjar district of Haryana if the government approved the Ministry's proposal for removing the 5,000-hectare cap on such SEZs on merits.

RIL's Haryana's project has already got BoA's in-priciple approval. Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath strongly favours lifting the cap which was imposed by empowered Group of Ministers less than a year ago following widespread protests over land acquisition.

The empowered GOM headed by External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee, which was scheduled to meet on February 4 to consider the cap among other issues, was postponed. New date has yet to be announced. But the Commerce ministry officials hope it would meet before February 25 to enable the BoA to take decisions on large SEZs requiring more than 5000 hectares of land.

Besides Reliance Industries, DLF, Omaxe and Ascendas have also planned mega multi-product SEZs.

UNI