Kolkata, Sep 21 (IANS) With deadlines missed twice, West Bengal’s new industrial policy is unlikely to be announced before October, after the end of the Durga Puja by the middle of the next month, state Secretariat ‘Nabanna’ sources said.
The initial deadline for finalising and announcing the new industrial policy was August 15 on the occasion of Independence Day.
However, that deadline was missed, and the middle of September was fixed as the time for the announcement of the new policy.
However, the Secretariat source involved in the process said that since some work to give the final shape to the new policy is yet to be done, the announcement will be made in the next month and, in all probability, after the Durga Puja.
According to the source, while the other aspects of the policy are complete, the main complications are related to finalising the policy for land procurement for industries, maintaining a balance in protecting the interests of both the state government as well as the landowners.
“In case of procurement of agricultural land for industries, besides the landowners, the interests of the sharecroppers and agricultural workers will also have to be protected. So, a combination of all these factors has made the process of finalising the policy for land procurement for industries a bit complicated. After all, past experiences show that land is a very sensitive issue in West Bengal considering the highly fragmented nature of landholding in the state, which often makes it quite difficult to get huge plots of land at one go for big industries in the manufacturing sector,” the source said.
According to him, the state government is clear about one thing on this issue – that neither will it apply the archaic acquisition rules to get land nor leave the entire responsibility of land procurement to the investors or industrialists concerned.
“Considering the extremely fragmented land-holding nature in West Bengal, it is impossible for the investors to contact and negotiate with so many land-owners to get the land for the state. So, the policy of the new government is that the state will do the negotiation part, directly purchase from landowners and subsequently hand over that purchased land to the investors,” the source said.
At the same time, the source added, the state government is also trying to work out a formula where the landowners could be made stakeholders in those industrial units for which the land will be procured.
“There could be two options for achieving that goal. The first option is to provide employment to one member of the land-owning family a job in the proposed industrial unit. The second option is enabling the landowners to set up ‘indirect support’ entrepreneurship catering to the main industrial unit,” the government official said.
–IANS
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