Patna, Dec. 12: The Bihar government today admitted that it had problems committing land and power to investors interested in setting up industrial units in the state.

“Besides the Centre’s reluctance to help us, the state has its share of handicaps on these counts. The government is faced with lasting bottlenecks with regard to giving power and land to the investors,” said deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi.

He was speaking at a conference, “State level reforms — Increasing investment in Bihar”, sponsored by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci).

Modi, who is also the finance minister, explained the state’s inherent shortcomings pertaining to availability of land and electricity. “The density of population in the state is abnormally high,” Modi said. Bihar, he pointed out, had a population density of 1,102 per square kilometre against 201 in Rajasthan, 236 in Madhya Pradesh, 398 in Gujarat and 365 in Maharashtra with the national average being 382 per sqkm.

The bifurcation of the state, Modi said, had further aggravated Bihar’s troubles as it lost forest, coal and mineral resources, which are critical for industrialisation. But in spite of facing an acute shortage of land, unlike Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu, the state had tried to step up the process of industrialisation, the deputy chief minister added. “The Bihar Industrial Area Development Authority has given land to 1,035 units in the current fiscal against 346 units during 2006-07,” he said.

Modi enumerated the government’s constraints on the power front too. “Power plants have a long gestation period,” he said, citing the example of the proposed Barh super thermal power project, which was yet to be commissioned though work began in 2003. “It will take another two to three years for commissioning,” Modi said.

He, however, conceded that the government’s big ticket power project at Nabinagar in Aurangabad could take another five to six years for completion.