By: Ravi Sinha
Track2Realty Exclusive
The government has also given more time to as many as 37 Special Economic Zone developers, including Navi Mumbai SEZ, DLF Commercial Developers and Tata Consultancy Services, to execute their projects. Five SEZ developers were allowed to surrender their projects as well. But the mounting criticism is now forcing the government to eject non-serious players from SEZ.
The non-execution and media criticism hasforced the government to rethink its strategy about developers sitting idle on the approvals. It expects the developers to either start work on the ground faster or surrender their applications and apply afresh when they are ready.
The Commerce Ministry will soon come out with a discussion paper on the Special Economic Zones in the backdrop of a large number of SEZs remaining only on paper and not getting operationalised.
Besides, it is only in a few states like Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Haryana and Rajasthan where the tax-free enclaves have come up. The Ministry has also called for suggestions from all stakeholders to comprehensively address the policy framework and operational issues of SEZs.
The lack of economic activity in most Special Economic Zones has also led to the suspicion that many promoters were incapable of attracting economic production units to their SEZs and are merely betting on them as real estate assets and relying on loopholes in the law to realise their value at a later date.
This suspicion is only reinforced by the number of real estate developers in the fray who have been advertising SEZs as their ‘crown jewels’ and collecting enormous sums from the market in public issues of shares.
However, instead of taking any corrective recourse to make their SEZs become an economic hub, there are developers who shrug off their responsibility and blame the Government policy for the failure to take off SEZ project. Even after being allowed to stake sell, and more time to developers, including Raheja Developers, they are still crying foul.
In an email query to Raheja Developers by Track2Realty, Manoj Goyal, Sr VP, Raheja Developers shot back, “There is no delay from our side. The delay is mainly due to delay in clearance of master plan and environment clearance. We do not agree that Government is giving top priority to SEZ. We have to approach all individual authorities whether State or Central for approvals. The environment clearance hassame long drawn processes as applicable to other projects. The approval of Master Plan is pending since more than two years. You would now understand how a developer could develop such a big project without such approval.”
……to be continued
