Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram has made a passionate call to India Inc to revive their "animal spirits" and offered every help to get their stalled projects off the ground, saying the Centre has set up a special panel to revive Rs 7-trillion worth of mega ventures stuck for years. The Minister also sought to sooth the frayed nerves of the market over the falling rupee, saying there is "no cause for alarm on the rupee" as capital inflows are strong.

 

His comments came after the rupee broke the 57-level to the dollar and touched a near one-year low in intra-day trade. It is not very far from the life-time low of 57.32 touched against the US unit on June 22 last year. "I think the rupee will stabilise and find its correct level," Chidambaram said after addressing the 66th AGM of the banking body IBA in Mumbai yesterday. He, however, admitted that falling rupee is hurting imports.

 

On the proposed special panel to identify stalled projects, he said "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." Since the setting up of the Cabinet Committee on Investment late last year, 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."

 

Assuring the industry that he is mindful of their disenchantment, the minister said, "policy decisions as well as decisions that will clear the bottlenecks have been taken, are being taken, will be taken in the next few days in four sectors. These are the roads sector, the coal sector, the oil & gas sector and the fertiliser sector."

"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 started. Once these projects get started, we will see the results of it on investment in the remaining three quarters of this fiscal," he said and assured that all each of these projects will be tracked and get implemented on a time-bound manner.

 

Noting that banks have already extended Rs 53,000 crore to these projects, Chidambaram said, "I want you bankers to closely work with this panel, because it is in your interest that these projects get off the ground, for it is your own money that is stuck." Admitting that nearly 340 projects worth Rs 10 trillion are stuck, he said his meetings with industrialists and banks in the past few months in Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai have made him constitute this panel. Giving a break-up of the stalled ventures, the Minister said while 215 are large ones worth Rs 7 trillion, 126 are medium projects worth Rs 3.5 trillion. Admitting that these schemes are hanging fire due to a litany of reasons, varying from the forest nod to pollution clearance, he sounded hopeful about solving these issues. "I am confident that these are not insurmountable problems. All we need to work together and revive our animal spirits by getting these projects kick-started."