FM for reviving animal spirits, starting stalled projects

Mumbai: Asking India Inc to revive its "animal spirits", Finance Minister P Chidambaram on Thursday announced setting up of a committee headed by Anil Swarup to re-start 215 large projects worth over Rs 7 lakh crore that have been stalled for various reasons.

"After extensive discussions today, the Prime Minister has approved the appointment of a very senior officer to the Cabinet Secretariat, Anil Swarup, to track these 215 stalled projects," he told the 66th annual general meeting of IBA, the umbrella body of the banking industry.

Since the setting up of the Cabinet Committee on Investment (CCI) in late 2012, projects worth 1.3 per cent of GDP had been cleared, he maintained.

"I think the first task before the country is to kick-start these projects, to remove the bottlenecks, to make sure that approvals, clearances, provisions are all given on time. We must revive the animal spirits ... so that we can get on with the job of implementing these projects. "I hope with this panel, which is likely to be constituted in a couple of days, we will be able to get these projects worth Rs 7 trillion identified and get started. Once these projects get started, we will see the results of them on investment in the remaining three quarters of this fiscal," he said.

Chidambaram is hoping to accelerate economic growth by getting stalled projects off the ground. His brainchild, CCI, has already cleared several thousand crores worth of projects in oil and gas, power and road sector.

Each of these projects that would be restarted on recommendation of the Swarup panel, will be tracked and get implemented on a time-bound manner, he said. Noting that banks have already extended Rs 53,000 crore to these projects, the Finance Minister said he wants the bankers to closely work with this panel, because it is in their interest that these projects get off the ground as this is their own money that is stuck.

Chidambaram also said the Cabinet will finalise some of the crucial pending decisions in the four key sectors - roads, coal, oil & gas and fertilisers - in the next three to four days, but did not offer details.