Chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi

The maiden meeting of the special cabinet on industries (udyog cabinet) would be held on November 7. Chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi will preside over it.

The announcement regarding the formation of the special cabinet, which will only deal with industry-related matters, was first made by Manjhi on June 11 during his first interaction with industrialists at Bihar Industries Association (BIA) auditorium after he took over as the chief minister a month ago.

“The first cabinet meeting on industries would be held on November 7 at the CM secretariat. We expect to discuss a lot of things,” Naveen Verma, the principal secretary of the industries department, confirmed in reply to a text message from The Telegraph.

The chief minister, while announcing the special cabinet, had said the main motive towards the formation of the cabinet was to look into different aspects and problems in the industry sector and come up with solutions and ideas.

Before this, former chief minister Nitish Kumar too had formed the krishi (agriculture) cabinet to focus on the agriculture sector. These cabinet meetings are different from the regular ones, as they tend to focus on just one sector, be it industries or agriculture, rather than all departments.

Following the announcement, the cabinet committee comprising 18 members had been formed by the state government regarding industrial development in August. The chief minister would head the committee and the chief secretary will be its committee secretary, it was said.

The industries department would be its nodal department and provide the committee with the facilities and data required. The state government added that apart from approvals of new schemes and review of work, the committee’s special focus would be on a single-window system and ensure that the system was functioning properly without any hiccups.

Sources said the industry bodies had been asked by the department to come up with suggestions and points which can be raised, discussed and approved in the first meeting. Experts said the meetings of the udyog cabinet would be more decisive than other schemes that the department has been running to attract investments and solve the existing problems such as land availability and others.

“We have been contacted by the department and we would raise the issues. The industries department holds two programmes — the udyami adalat each week and the udyami panchayat on the fifth Monday of any given month. There are entrepreneurs and industrialists coming up with their issues and they are looked into. In the udyami panchayat, a lot of issues are discussed. In the first cabinet meeting, we demand that all the problems of the industrialists, which have been raised in these two programmes, be solved. The cabinet meeting, on any given day, is more important than the other initiatives the department has taken. Decisions in the cabinet meetings are final and are notified,” Arun Agarwal, the president of Bihar Industries Association, said.

A section of industrialists said announcements of several schemes for the industries department had become a habit of the state government with most of them either turning out to be damp squibs or doing little or no good.