Six months after setting up the Cabinet Committee on Investment (CCI) to remove hurdles in clearance of long-stalled mega projects, the UPA government has now announced formation of yet another panel under a senior official of the PMO to help the former restart 215 infrastructure projects where 90 per cent of the land has been acquired, or permissions from a single body are pending. This will be yet another committee to resolve a deadlock the government has failed to break even as 341 projects with a total investment of Rs 10.5 lakh crore are waiting clearance. The CCI has met only five times during the last six months without making much headway except appointing three committees to review the environmental clearance process for mining, the environmental impact assessment norms for buildings, roads and special economic zones, and “unresolved bottlenecks” in the road sector.
How the formation of yet another panel will help is anybody’s guess. Instead of appointing more committees, the CCI should meet more often than once a month and have a process to review projects that it had cleared earlier. There is need to put in place systems and processes with limited or no discretion at the hands of ministers and bureaucrats. The CCI must ensure that its decisions have gotten off the ground.
It is not merely the bureaucracy that is holding back projects but also the politics behind it. Projects like Vedanta and Posco, for example, are caught in the political crossfire between a Congress-led Centre and an opposition-ruled state. What we need is minimum governance agreement between the major parties, not new laws, new ministers and new committees. This is something the National Investment Board (NIB) mooted by P Chidambaram sought to achieve before it was shot down due to inter-ministry turf war. The NIB had powers to overrule ministries which the CCI does not have. It is now for the prime minister to assert his political authority and get things going.