Time to reassess MIHAN’s performance
| Date :29-Oct-2022 |
By Vijay Phanshikar
Whether people in power accept this or not, but time has come for a complete reassessment of the value and worth of Nagpur’s much-hyped mega project MIHAN -- Multi-Modal International Passenger and Cargo Hub and Airport at Nagpur. For, MIHAN has failed to attract industry in proportion to the investment of land and infrastructure that saw displacement of countless hundreds of farmers and others from rural parts. For, lame justification the officials offer for this failure convinces no one. Hence the need to have a reassessment of its value and worth.
True, the project may not be scrapped for its sheer size and prestige attached to it. By that argument, the Government of Maharashtra will have to keep the project on and keep making efforts to attract investment there.
It would certainly be too brazen to suggest that the project did not attract any investment at all. For, the larger MIHAN and the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) embedded in it have attracted some investment by a few prestigious industrial entities. But if MIHAN has attracted some units, it also has lost quite a few units in the past fifteen years. The authorities of the Maharashtra Airport Development Company Ltd. do admit this fact, all right, but generally try to blame the managements of those units for failure to keep their respective commitments towards launch or production time-lines.
The units that did not start their projects at MIHAN include many big names whose record elsewhere has been spectacular. And this very point leads to a suspicion that the MIHAN authorities have messed up things from their side. ‘The Hitavada’ has known at least a few enterprises that have not got land in MIHAN even when the applicants were fulfilling all the mandatory requirements and norms.
Thus, the authorities did not accommodate quite some applicants and also could not retain many others, thanks to the absence of a properly drawn retention policy. That was not because the project lacked space, but because the authorities lacked willingness to extend total helping hand.
Making things more difficult for those units that failed to launch their respective projects, the authorities also are known to have imposed punishing penalties upon those managements -- making it all the more difficult for the units to launch their projects.
Of course, bureaucratic wisdom does suggest that such measures are in perfect order. That may be right, no doubt. But when a special project is to be made successful, it needs not just a bureaucratic handling or an embarrassing political push by bigwigs in the Government -- for reasons that are not exactly economic or industrial. It requires a very special and expert handling of the needs of a massive project like MIHAN.
Quite a few managements of units in SEZ also are known to grumble that no sincere effort is made by the authorities to offer the units appropriate concessions on a continued basis so that they stayed put.
Technically, the authorities may be right in taking certain steps to discipline units, all right, but those who have watched industrial development in the region over time feel that a creative flexibility is needed to retain units in MIHAN or SEZ instead of rigid, bureaucratic application of mind -- so that the units feel that they are wanted.
Nobody, of course, wants to be identified for different reasons, but there are complaints about mishandling of the challenge of the management of such a mega industrial estate project that ate up thousands of hectares of land but did not succeed in attracting investment.
There is economic ripple-effect impact of the failure of MIHAN to take off despite the passage of more than one and a half decades. For, the countless numbers of mass housing projects that have mushroomed around MIHAN now threaten their promoters with bankruptcy, to say the least. For, literally hundreds and hundreds of residential units are lying in wait for takers that come in disappointingly small numbers.
The reason is simple: MIHAN has not attracted enough investment, and so it also has not generated enough employment -- to support related economic activity in the area.
Today, MIHAN is less known for industry and more known for institutions such as the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and the Indian Institute of Management (IIM-Nagpur).
If this was what the authorities meant to achieve in such a mega project, then the project must be rated as an abject failure. And by any standard, this calls for a serious reassessment of the MIHAN as a five-star project of the Government of Maharashtra.