The moderately sized Sonegaon airport is set to metamorphose into one of the biggest in the country as a part of the ambitious MIHAN project. While 644 hectares of land in Shivangaon is under acquisition for the airport expansion, over 2,000 hectares have been acquired for the SEZ.
The proposed Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) depot of aviation giant Boeing is a part of the MIHAN-SEZ project, which its executive head R.C. Sinha claims to be the biggest ongoing project in the country.
Kerala CM shows that it can be done: the govt can act on behalf of the disempowered to recover illegally acquired land from companies.
IT special economic zones (SEZ) may find a new anchor. The government is considering setting up special investment regions (SIR) where the IT SEZs could be housed to enable small and medium IT companies avail benefits from both the schemes. Under the SIR scheme, the government would provide basic infrastructure such as roads and power while the SEZ scheme would provide for tax benefits.
An article by Manju Menon, Kanchi Kohli and Divya Badami on Environment and Forest Clearance issues in SEZs
The material here will be familiar to most readers of this blog.
War zones
The present and future of India’s SEZs
Indian policymakers rush headlong towards the discredited model of China’s Special Economic Zones, even as people-power movements pose a challenge.
China’s Shenzhen has workers slaving for 9-14 hours a day at less than minimum wages, 500,000 child labourers, and a crime rate nine times that of Shanghai. Is this the economic model Indian policymakers want to emulate, especially at a time when China itself has discredited and abandoned its SEZ policy?
(more…)
From the mid-’80s, China experienced a ‘zone fever’ much like India’s, with millions of hectares of agricultural land being transferred to infrastructure and industrial use. But Beijing woke up in time to the dangers of the speculative bubble thus created and acted to conserve arable lands. (more…)