India’s land bank launched
In a move to make it easy
for investors to identify sites for setting up manufacturing units, commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal on Thursday launched a one-stop repository of the country’s land bank comprising information on available and vacant plots, satellite view of terrain and heat maps on the natural resources there.
The National GIS-enabled Land Bank system- a database of industrial areas and clusters across states- has information on more than 3,300 industrial parks across 31 states and UTs covering about 4.75 lakh hectare land. “Information available includes forest, drainage; raw material heat maps (agricultural, horticulture, mineral layers); multiple layers of connectivity”, the commerce and industry ministry said in a statement, adding that the project is launched for six states with others likely to be onboarded by December. The portal will also have information related to champion sectors and high priority sectors under “Make in India” such as state and district wise net industrial land available, relevant contact details, traces the land available for investment, current external infrastructure geo-tagged such as road, rail, airport and dry port connectivity to all industrial hotspots.
One District One Product
On the approach of ‘One District One Product’ (ODOP), Goyal said that the approach seeks to add existing industrial capacity beyond the urban areas and create productive manufacturing from a rural/semi urban areas.
“The minister said that states should identify products with a market potential for import substitution and export accentuation, and establish forward and backward market linkage channels,” the ministry said quoting Goyal after he had a virtual meeting with the industry ministers of states and UT administrators to promote industrial activity and investment It added that states will identify products unique to each district to develop districts as export hubs, and integrate with their district level exports strategies which would then feed into the state level export strategies. “District and cluster level export strategy will benet artisans and small and micro scale producers thereby integrating them directly with global supply chains,” Goyal said.
The exercise is part of India’s eorts to attract investments into the country. The government is already working on a one-stop digital platform to obtain all requisite central and state clearances required to start business operations in India.
Goyal also said the concept of deemed approval can be adopted in the upcoming single window.
On the issue of ‘Aatma Nirbhar Bharat’, he said India may invoke the reciprocity clause with countries where Indian companies face restrictive trade practises. He said bidders with benecial ownership /belonging to countries sharing land border with India, will be able to participate in government procurements only after a mandatory registration, based on clearances given by the government.
Common Information
The Common Information Sharing Environment (CISE) is an EU initiative which aims to make European and EU/EEA Member States surveillance systems interoperable to give all concerned authorities from different sectors access to the classified and unclassified information they need to conduct missions at sea.
The development of CISE was proposed in 2009 and has been refined and developed since then. Following interoperability projects such as BlueMassMed, MARSUNO and CoopP, the project “European testbed for the maritime Common Information Sharing Environment in the 2020 perspective” (EUCISE2020) was launched in 2014. EUCISE2020 developed a pre-operational network for information exchanged to pave the way for a fully operational CISE. The project was concluded in March 2019.
As from April 2019, EMSA is engaged in the setting up and enabling, in close coordination with the Member States, the Transitional Phase, ensuring a coherent evolution of the CISE network and to achieve an operational CISE.
