Government clears 170 stalled investment projects

There’s some good news, peppered with bad, on the investment front for the NDA government that is about to complete two years in office. Since March 2015, it has successfully removed roadblocks facing 170 stalled investment projects worth over Rs 6,00,000 crore, paving the way for their quicker implementation.

Yet, the task of unravelling red tape from such long-delayed projects that are driving up non-performing assets in the banking sector, is proving to be virtually Sisyphean. Over the same period, 260 more held up projects worth almost Rs 7 lakh crore were added to the waiting list of projects seeking government’s intervention to uproot obstacles thwarting them.

As a consequence, 395 stalled investment plans worth Rs 19.7 lakh crore now await an intervention from the project monitoring group in the cabinet secretariat that was set up to facilitate clearances, licences and other policy hurdles holding up large investment projects. The corresponding numbers in March 2015 stood at 305 projects worth Rs 18.84 lakh crore.

While the group only facilitates clearances for projects with investments of over Rs 1,000 crore or critical public sector infrastructure projects below that investment threshold, the rise in its pending workload ties in with the assessment of the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) that the spectre of stalled projects has peaked in March 2016.

According to CMIE, the value of the stock of stalled projects as a proportion of projects under implementation peaked at 12.3 per cent as of March 2016.

The number of stalled projects have also peaked, at 16 per cent of all projects under implementation, the agency noted.

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Source:Thehindu