With a view to ensuring an accelerated industrial growth in the State, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has pressed for including Odisha in the East Coast Economic Corridor (ECEC) to integrate the State with domestic and global production network. Patnaik in his letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday recalled how he had raised the issue in the first meeting of the Governing Council of NITI Aayog on February 8 last.
Pointing out that as Odisha is already on fast track of industrial development, it needs to be included in the ECEC, the country’s first coastal corridor project conceived by the Union Government’s Industrial Policy and Promotion. “It is understood that Phase I of the ECEC, being developed with assistance from Asian Development Bank (ADB), will only cover Chennai to Visakhapatnam,” stated Patnaik while pleading before the Prime Minister to extend the corridor up to Baleswar in the phase. If the corridor is allowed to pass through the established and emerging industrial clusters of the State, it will help link it with the hinterland and beyond, which in turn will result in creating substantial employment opportunities for the youths and unemployed in the State, said Patnaik.
“The industrial clusters in the State comprising aluminum, steel, petrochemical sectors are linked to East Asian and Asian market in a limited way,” he told the Prime Minister while trying to justify the extension of Chennai-Visakhapatnam corridor to Odisha. It will act as a gateway to the ASEAN region connecting the supply links, said Patnaik.
The Chief Minister said that the State has three ports such as Gopalpur, Paradip and Dhamra which will add value to the development of corridor and stimulate economic activities in the existing and emerging industrial clusters planned in the State. Though the ECEC was planned to connect Chennai with Kolkata to provide a natural connectivity to South East and East Asian production networks, in Phase I Chennai-Visakhapatnam has been posed to ADB.
Even as ADB earlier had evinced interest in connecting Chennai with Kolkata to make it more suitable for the coastal States to get connected through this economic corridor, in a later development, Odisha was deleted from it. With less check points and physical inspections and single point tax payment system, the ECEC is expected to boost connectivity, feel experts.