At a recent meeting, World Bank representative John Speakman had told the state government: “PPD is a key to growth and the time has arrived to implement it. It’s better to do nothing than promise policies and not deliver them.”

Following this, the government has working on establishing dialogue with investors. It has already sent senior officials from the Department of Urban Development, Technical Education and Housing to Mumbai to hold informal meetings with major industrial players.

Besides, a series of meetings are slated on January 30 and February 5 in New Delhi, to be presided over by state Chief Secretary Atul Kumar Gupta. Apart from investors and officials of the state government, representatives and members of various industrial associations and chambers will participate in these meetings.

“Letters have been sent to all chambers and association in this connection,” said a senior government official. He added that as no investor has come forward for PPP projects, a new approach was being adopted. “We have to change the approach. Instead of thinking that we are obliging the investor, we need to invite them in a respectful and friendly way. The investors had given suggestions and sought changes in different schemes, which were overlooked,” he said.

The aim behind the scheduled meetings was to receive a feedback from the investors on the viability of the projects and then design the schemes accordingly. The PPP projects of four departments — Tourism, Housing, Transport and Technical Education — will be discussed in the Delhi meetings. All the departments have reworked their proposals.

For instance, the Technical Education department will now only work on setting up new polytechnics and technical institutes. This way, it will eliminate the problem of government employees in the already existing institutes and polytechnics, who resisted privatisation. In connection to transport, the government intends to invite bigger players. In the tourism sector, voluntary retirement will be offered to government employees of hotels and the equity will be divided with the investor — 76 per cent share will belong to the investor and 24 per cent to the government.

However, the associations find the government’s effort too little and too late. They recall the mega investors meet scheduled last July, in which all big industrial houses across the country were supposed to participate. It was cancelled at the last moment due to “political reasons”. Since then, no big investors’ event has been held in the state.