Friday, September 22, 2006

IT, ITES sectors top in SEZs approval

R. Gopalakrishnan and P. Rajkrishnan

A.P., Karnataka and T.N attract major IT zones

CHENNAI: As many as 85 of the 150 Special Economic Zones, which have obtained "formal approval" from the Board of Approvals for SEZs so far, will be devoted to the category of information technology and IT-enabled services.

These IT/ITES zones will be located in 14 States, but the largest number of approvals is in the case of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu (each 16), followed by Maharashtra (10) and West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh (five each). Thus these six States account for 68 of the 85 zones in the IT sector.

Understandably, however, these zones account for a small portion of land area allotted to the SEZs as a whole.

Most IT/ITES zones will cover around 20 ha or a smaller area. The few large ones exceeding one hundred hectares, include MIDC (Hinjawadi, 229 ha), Karnataka Industrial Areas Development Board (Mangalore, 203 ha), Sanghi Industries (Ranga Reddy district, Andhra Pradesh), 202 ha, ELCOT (Sholinganallur, 159 ha), Infosys (Dakshina Kannada district, 125 ha) and ETL Infrastructure (Chinglepet, 105 ha).

In terms of the number of approved SEZs, the next in ranking sector-wise are pharmaceuticals and biotechnology (14), multi-product (10) and textiles/apparel (9) and electronic hardware and telecommunication equipment (9). There has been some overlapping of sectoral categories in the case of some zones like IT hardware and software/ITES, electronics and pharmaceuticals and biotechnology.

Among major States, Bihar does not figure at all in the list of approved SEZs.

Gujarat is the only State that has an approval for a zone devoted to petroleum and petro-products. Uttar Pradesh will have an SEZ devoted to non-conventional energy equipment. Only two SEZs, one each in Kerala and Maharashtra, will be devoted to the agro/food processing sector. This is apparently because many investors would already have obtained approvals under the agro-processing zones under the Foreign Trade Policy.

The only Free Trade Warehousing Zone approved so far will be located in Andhra Pradesh (to be set up by Fab City SPV India Pvt Ltd in Hyderabad over 486 hectares), while three zones (Maharashtra 2, Jharkhand 1) will be devoted to automobiles/auto components. The only multi-services SEZ approved will be located at Gurgaon in Haryana.

Other SEZ categories approved include leather and footwear, engineering, glass and ceramic.

Multi-product zones
Multi-product zones are the ones which stand out in terms of the area allotted.

These include (in hectares) APIIC-Vizag (2,309), Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation-Dahej (1,768), Mundra (1,081), Gujrat Adani Port (2,658), Essar Hazira (1,100) and Essar Jamnagar (2,470).

http://www.hindu.com/2006/08/27/stories/2006082706091300.htm


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