LAND ACQUISITION WOES HIT GOVTS AUTO TESTING CENTRE PLANS

Roudra Bhattacharya

New Delhi: The Governments initiative for building automotive testing and research centres across the country the National Automotive Testing and R AND D Infrastructure Project (NATRiP) may get delayed by a few months due to land acquisition issues for the proposed Rae Bareilly centre.

According to sources, the Ministry of Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises, which is in charge of the project, had earlier set a commissioning date of September 2011. However, Government officials expect completion only by March 2012.

Started in 2008, the NATRiP project plans to set up seven testing centres across the country where each centre would have its own area of expertise like a speed test track and hill driving. Out of these, the existing centres at Manesar, Pune and Ahmednagar are being upgraded and expanded, while others at Silchar (Assam), Chennai, Indore and Rae Bareilly are being built from scratch.

The Government has envisaged a total project cost of Rs 1,718 crore, of which tenders worth Rs 1,500 crore have already been approved, said Ministry officials.

The centre near Rae Bareilly is stuck because of land acquisition issues. The Uttar Pradesh Government has not cleared the proposal to set up a testing centre it has been 5-6 months since we submitted the proposal. However, the Steel Authority of India Ltd (SAIL) had agreed to give 150 acres from the Malvika Steel plant, said a source.

SAIL had acquired Malvika Steel plant on February 27, 2009, after it was declared sick by its previous owner the Jaypee Group. Jaypee had in fact acquired the plant two years earlier from the Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR). The plant was originally started by the Usha Group in 1998, but had run into financial trouble.

Mr Ambuj Sharma, Joint Secretary, Heavy Industries, told Business Line that the Ministry had first applied for land elsewhere in the vicinity of Rae Bareilly, but had not met with success.

We had asked for land elsewhere also in UP, but this was not sanctioned by the State Government. Then SAIL had agreed to provide us land at the steel plant, but even that is stuck now with the Government. If the Rae Barelli centre gets delayed by a further 4-6 months, then it will surely postpone the commissioning of the overall project even beyond the new March 2012 deadline, he said.

Mr Sharma said that the other six projects are going according to schedule and that the Ministry had incurred a total expenditure of Rs 600 crore so far. He added that when all seven centres would be operational, the Government could expect annual revenues from the NATRiP project to touch Rs 400-500 crore.

The iCAT Manesar Center is already operating at about 50 per cent capacity. This year (2009-10) it gave us a turnover of Rs 30 crore, he said.