TN plans ‘land pooling model’ for industrial use

The Tamil Nadu government plans to aggregate large areas of land through a ‘land pooling model’ to allow owners join to hands with the government to develop land for industrial use, according to State Industries Secretary Vikram Kapur.

“We are trying an innovative model of land aggregation, which possibly was not tried in the country except in Gujarat, that too in urban development. It will make landowners stakeholders and will be win-win situation for everyone,” Kapur said in his address at FICCI TNSC: First Executive Committee Meeting of Tamil Nadu 2017.

The state government plans to create a land bank of nearly 54,000 acres of developed industrial lands. “We have almost reached the half-way mark and the rest of it is in various stages of acquisition. Under the new Land Acquisition Act, there are certain difficulties, including providing higher compensation to owners,” he said.

On the two industrial corridors — Chennai-Bengaluru and Chennai-Kanyakumari — Kapur said a lot of work has gone in to developing the corridors that will provide huge opportunity for private sector developing industrial estate and also provide infrastructure service.

The Chennai-Kanyakumari corridor, which will be an extension of the Vizag-Chennai corridor, supported by ADB has six industrial nodes. The key among them being Madurai-Thoothukudi in southern Tamil Nadu.

State government is laying lot of focus on ease of doing business. Tamil Nadu slipped to 18th rank from 12th in the recent Ease of Doing Index by the Centre in assistance with the World Bank. One of the reasons for the lower ranking was that the methodology itself was quite complicated and relied on large number of compliances and evidences, which the State could not file on time.

“I am not saying that these rankings don’t matter. However, there are people who say that Tamil Nadu continues to be a destination of choice for investors and ranks among the top three in terms of investment,” he said.

Industrial climate in the State is peaceful and robust with several factors like availability of land, surplus power and infrastructure like ports, airports, road and connectivity.

Kapur said out of the 98 memorandums of understanding with a committed investment of ₹2.42 lakh crore by industries signed at the Global Investors Meet in 2015, 62 projects are at various stages of implementation.

An investment of nearly ₹25,000 crore has actually happened in all these projects, he said.

COMMENT NOW