By IANS,
Kolkata : The West Bengal government will come up with a fresh incentive scheme for industrial units in December focussing on employment generation.
“Our goal is to provide an incentive to the units for generating employment. Now we give incentive only on capital expenditure,” state industry secretary Sabyasachi Sen said at a programme here Wednesday.
The old scheme, formulated in 2004, expired in March, and the new scheme would be given retrospective effect from April, Sen said.
He said 50 percent of the incentive given to an entrepreneur would be for capital expenditure, and the rest for employment generation.
“We have to find a way of monitoring the employment generation in a unit. We are working out the mechanism. We want to be guided by the documents with the Regional Provident Fund Commissioner,” Sen said.
The bureaucrat said the West Bengal government was also in talks with the Damodar Valley Corp (DVC) on storage of water in the Damodar river system, which could turn large tracts of fallow land in the western parts of the state into fertile land.
“We lose an immense proportion of water in the river system as we don’t have proper storage mechanism. So the amount of water we get from it very limited. If we can harness the water properly, then agriculture will get a big boost,” he said.
With the scheme involving a huge investment, the state government was looking at the feasibility of the project and exploring the public-private partnership model. It has also approached Jadavpur University for technological inputs.
Sen admitted the state government’s much-vaunted single window system of industrial clearance was practically non-existent.
“There are practical difficulties. There are different laws under which the entrepreneur has to take approval. And there is a multiplicity of agencies dealing with the approval process,” he said during an interaction with entrepreneurs at a seminar organised by the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII).
However, the state government was now trying to make things easier by reducing the number of departments an investor has to approach from 20-25 at present to six to seven, Sen said.