NEW DELHI, JULY 6: Yielding to Goa’s insistence on cancelling all special economic zones (SEZs), the Commerce and Industry ministry has finally said it could denotify the SEZs if the state seized the land allotted to developers and returned their money along with interest and compensated them for investment already made on the ground.

According to officials in the Department of Commerce, the Centre would then be able to denotify these SEZs since they would not have any land to execute the projects. Six developers have so far paid two of the three instalments amounting to Rs 280 crore to the Goa Industrial Development Corporation (GIDC) for about 600 acres allotted to them. They have made investments of about Rs 500 crore over and above this.

Three of these six SEZs — K Raheja Corporation, Peninsula Pharma Research Centre and Meditab Specialities — are notified under the SEZ Act 2005 and the Goa government has been repeatedly asking the Centre to denotify them due to political opposition to SEZs in the state.

At a meeting of the Board of Approval for SEZs on June 4, the Centre had made it clear that it was not possible to denotify the three SEZs since there was no provision to do so under the SEZ Act. But now, the Centre has given up. Officials in the Commerce department, however, said Goa refused to compensate the developers and was yet to initiate talks with them.

There have been widespread protests in Goa against the setting up of SEZs over the past year by villagers and activists which led the state government to cancel all approved SEZs and recommend denotification of the rest by the Central government. This has left SEZ promoters in Goa hanging in mid-air.

The GIDC had started accepting applications for setting up SEZs in 2006 and had eventually leased this land — a total of 600 acres of industrial estate — to six companies for SEZs. This land was acquired by GIDC way back in 2001. Apart from the three notified SEZs, the others, which had cleared the approval stage, are Inox Mercantile Co Pvt Ltd, Paradigm Logistics Distribution Pvt Ltd, Planetview Mercantile Company Pvt Ltd, and Maxgrow Finlease Pvt Ltd.