P Chidambaram urges colleagues to overcome policy paralysis, says Rs 7,500 crore investments stuck i.

NEW DELHI: Finance Minister P Chidambaram has urged his cabinet colleagues to "get together" in order to overcome policy paralysis, pointing out that 700 projects with investments of Rs 7,500 crore are stuck due to delays caused by the absence of regulatory approvals.

The finance minister, who was making a presentation to his cabinet colleagues, said the delays were on account of the absence of environmental and other regulatory approvals as well as problems stemming from land acquisition, difficulty in arranging financing and and arranging fuel supply.

"If the 78 of us can get together for the next five months, 2013-14 can be a happy year," Chidambaram is learnt to have told his colleagues, while making the presentation on the "Current state of the economy" on Thursday.

The government is particularly concerned about investments, from domestic and foreign, drying up. The recent surge of reform measures, many of them procedural in nature, is aimed at breaking the logjam and removing hurdles in investment flows.

In a rare admission by the government, the FM has acknowledged that projects stuck across key sectors as on September 2012 had reached the highest since 2005, when the number of such delayed projects was less than 100.

Policy paralysis and bureaucratic delays peaked between September 2011 and June 2012 - a period in which Pranab Mukherjee, now the President of India was the finance minister - when as many 300 projects came to a halt with approvals held up at various government departments.


Source : timesofindia.indiatimes.com