Anticipating that the Election Commission would announce the poll schedule in March, the chief minister on January 13 had directed her officers to ensure that work on all infrastructure related projects — especially the ones to be carried out on public-private partnership basis — commences by February 15.

During the meeting, attended by ministers and senior officers of all the departments concerned, Mayawati had directed them to expedite the projects, which had been announced by her over the last one-and-a-half years.

Pulling them up for not having been able to attract investors, she had underlined an urgent need to have serious dialogue with investors. She had also handed over a list of over two dozen schemes with a clear instruction that work on them should start by mid February.

Of all the schemes, the government could succeed in handing over the Letter of Intent to Torrent Power for distribution of power in Kanpur and Agra on a franchisee system. The future of other schemes is, however, now in a limbo. A string of projects that have been affected by the moral code of conduct include disinvestment of tourism hotels/guest houses and sugar mills. The process of disinvestment got delayed due to several obstructions, including legal cases.

Other schemes like introducing private buses on state routes, or introducing security registration number plates, developing hi-tech cities under Integrated Urban Rejuvenation Plan, failed to attract any investor.

The government, meanwhile, had also started working on an Industrial Policy, after receiving flak from the World Bank representative John Speakman. At a meeting on PPP projects, on January 17, Speakman had said: “It is better not to make any promise, rather than not keeping them.” Since then, Udyog Bandhu - the executive body of the Industries Department, had been working on it. According to sources, the working group for the policy has met about half a dozen times and a portion of the draft has already been completed.

However, the officials do not find the picture so grim. “The elections do not mean that the official work stops. Rather we will get time to do the ground work like preparing the concession agreement which takes time”, said a senior officials in the Industries Department.