The proposed SmartCity Kochi received a shot in the arm on Monday with a meeting of the Board of Approval (BoA) of the Union Commerce Ministry approving Special Economic Zone status for the remaining 114 acres of the total 246 acres.
The land will be notified as SEZ once the formalities are completed and requisite documents are submitted. Formalities, it is learnt, are likely to be completed within a month.
The decision has laid to rest apprehensions over whether the entire project site would be notified as a single SEZ as there was a water body separating the land into two parts. It was feared that a single SEZ status would not be granted on account of the contiguity factor.
The decision will also give more clarity to discussions when the board of directors of SmartCity Kochi meets in Kochi in a week.
“The single SEZ status will help to create the social infrastructure required to fulfill the knowledge township envisaged by SmartCity in Kochi. Multiple SEZ would have fragmented the entire processing and created hurdles in creating clusters of companies,” Baju George, Managing Director of SmartCity (India), told The Hindu .
He said that it will also give an impetus to the preparation of a master plan as there is now clarity about the land. Mr. George said that though the law did not prohibit giving a single SEZ status to land separated by a water body, SmartCity Kochi is one among the first to be granted such a status.
Of the 246 acres of the project site, 132 acres was notified as SEZ in March this year. A meeting of the BoA held later that month had deferred decision on an application seeking SEZ status for the remaining 114 acres on account of impending Assembly elections.
Similarly, the decision on applications from three other States — West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu — and the Union Territory of Puducherry, which were also set to go to polls, was also deferred.
Though the meeting deferred the application, it laid to rest at that time itself concerns over whether 114 acres, which were part of the 246 acres but separated by a water body, would be denied SEZ on the ground of contiguity factor. The BoA’s relaxation of the contiguity factor at that meeting on applications from other States with similar issues of contiguity assured a favourable decision in the case of the Kochi project as well.
Besides, the letter recommending SEZ by the Cochin SEZ Development Commissioner had also sought for a waiver of the contiguity factor.
