The Haryana Cabinet on Friday abandoned its ambitious 25,000-acre Special Economic Zone (SEZ) with Reliance Industries in Gurgaon and Jhajjar districts by approving a proposal to take back 1383.68 acres of land given by it in 2006 to implement the project.
The same land originally acquired by the Haryana State Industrial Development Corporation (HSIDC) will now be utilised to develop a Global City Project as an investment node under the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor Project (DMIC). The Global City is envisaged as a high-value manufacturing area with an international exhibition and convention centre, skill development centres and central business district and township facilities.
The Global City is a replacement of sorts for the International Convention centre that the State government had planned along the KMP Expressway but is presently stayed by the Supreme Court, said Yudhivir Malik, Principal Secretary, Industries. “Since that project is stayed for long and this land was coming back to us, the government thought it prudent to develop the GC, here, which has some components of the International Convention centre too in it,” he told The Hindu . The SEZ with Reliance, the government admitted, became economically unviable mainly due to the imposition of Minimum Alternate Tax (MAT), withdrawal of tax holiday, a slowdown in the global economy and prohibitively high land prices.
The Haryana State Industrial Development Corporation and Reliance Ventures Limited had entered into a Joint Venture Agreement in June 2006 for setting up this SEZ and soon after, the land was transferred to the special purpose vehicle floated for this purpose.
