A section of the companies are worried over the move of the State Government to go in for physical verification of the steel and power projects and when the members of the team led by the State-run Ipicol CMD G Mathivathanan landed at their sites for physical verification of the projects on Thursday, many of them seemed helpless, admitted an insider in a project.
"We have set up three teams to undertake physical verification of 30 steel projects and seven power projects of the Companies which have signed Memorandum of understanding (MoUs) with the Government for extension of the MoUs,” said Mathivathanan. The teams are likely to submit their reports within a week," he added.
Earlier, the Government had set up a committee comprising members from Ipicol, Idco, Water Resources Department and State Pollution Control Board, an expert of the Steel and Mines Department and the Collectors of the concerned districts to assess the financial and physical progress of the projects.
The Government has also engaged an expert from Mecon ltd, a public sector undertaking under the Union Ministry of Steel for the service. Each plant is inspected by at least five team members.
“There are marked differences between the written documents sent by the promoters and the physical verification,” revealed a team member under condition of anonymity. This move is undertaken before extending validity of their MoUs as some of them have reported wrongly about their progress and achieving the milestones stipulated in the MoUs, he said.
The Ipicol has been entrusted with the task of assessing the progress of project implementation and making recommendations on the extension of the validity of the MoUs. It had earlier asked steel and power plants to give details of their physical and financial progress as per a check-list given to them.
About 45 steel projects, including Posco, Jindal, Tata Steel, Arcelor-Mittal, Bhushan and Essar, have applied for renewal of their MoUs. Two mega projects, Posco and ArcelorMittal, are lagging behind the schedule, he added.
Only 30 of the 50 MoU-signed steel projects have submitted their reports while seven power projects also came forward with their achievement cards.
The Government wanted to revise the provisions of the MoU in January this year and decided not to guarantee raw material linkage to any industry as given in the initial MoUs.