Patna, Sept. 6: The mid-term review of Bihar’s Industrial Incentive Policy is in its final stage and the new draft has sops for the micro, small and medium enterprises in the state.
The new draft would be sent to the cabinet for approval this month. The industries department, which had announced the mid-term review of the policy last year, has taken the views of different industrial bodies while making the changes, department officials said.
However, with the department not disclosing changes being made, the representatives of industry bodies said the revised policy would be lucrative for those running or planning to start small and medium industries in Bihar.
The state government’s theory to concentrate on the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) sector is in line with the view of former chief minister Nitish Kumar who had made it clear last year it was more important for the state to concentrate on the smaller investments and facilitate them rather hoping and waiting for big players to come to Bihar. On September 2, chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi said Bihar didn’t need big investments and the state was satisfied with small players.
Today, Union MSME minister Kalraj Mishra announced that the Centre would soon announce a new policy for sector and that the ministry was working on it.
The Bihar Industrial Incentive Policy was announced in 2006 and had been revised in 2011.
“The preparation of the new draft after the review is in its final stage and it will be presented before the cabinet this month. The new policy would have some schemes aimed at the development of the MSME sector in the state. An investor wishing to set up a MSME unit in Bihar gets a subsidy of Rs 75 lakh. The maximum range of investment to come into the bracket of MSME is Rs 10 crore as fixed by the Centre. So, an industrialist investing Rs 10 crore in Bihar just gets a subsidy of Rs 75 lakh. In the revised policy, this amount has been increased to Rs 2 crore. But then the fresh subsidy will be in accordance with 20 per cent of the investment. This revision will definitely boost the MSME sector in Bihar,” Arun Agarwal, the president of the Bihar Industries Association (BIA), told The Telegraph.
The revised policy has clauses, which aim to stop non-serious investors in Bihar, besides focusing on tourism and health sectors. “The government has been focusing towards serious and actual investments and the revised policy aims to ensure that. Any investor coming with a project will need to have at least 20 per cent of the project cost with them when they apply for an State Investment Promotion Board (SIPB) approval,” an office holder at the Bihar Chamber of Commerce and Industries, said.
The state government is also concentrating on certain sectors like manufacturing, tourism and others and two sectors, namely health and tourism, are on the government’s priorities.
“Investments in the tourism and the health sector are being sought and the present tourism policy will be re-designed and made more investment-specific. A policy on health investments and the re-designed policy on tourism investments will be coming up,” Shailendra Sinha, the chairman of the Bihar State Council of the Confederation of Indian Industry, said. Yesterday, Sinha had said Bihar was focusing on three strategies to solve the land issue.
“The first strategy is to get surplus land available with other departments. Second, the government is not thinking about land acquisition, it plans to buy land from the landowners paying them amounts according to the circle rate of the area. The third is the creation of private industrial areas. These measures will take time but will help the state to get land for industries,” Sinha said.
