Central government to shelve plans to set up NICA

The central government has decided to shelve its plan to set up a national industrial corridor authority (NICA), a nodal body to oversee work relating to all national industrial corridors. The plan has been put on hold due to the delay foreseen by the Prime Minister’s Office and the cabinet secretariat in getting parliamentary approval for it to be conferred “statutory” status. Meanwhile, a fresh cabinet note has been sent to the concerned ministries, seeking comments on a plan to make the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor Development Corporation (DMICDC) the coordinating body for corridors, so as to move ahead with proposals relating to corridors under implementation. The earlier plan was to subsume DMICDC and the DMIC Project Implementation Trust under NICA. However, this, too, has been put off due to complications involved in transferring the Japan Bank for International Cooperation’s 26 per cent stake in DMICDC to NICA. Besides DMIC, other proposed corridors include the Amritsar-Kolkata, Bengaluru-Mumbai, Chennai-Bengaluru, and Visakhapatnam-Chennai corridors. Once DMICDC becomes the nodal agency, its head will have the power to approve all proposals relating to the corridors. These will then be forwarded to the DMIC Trust for final clearance.