The HDA was set up by the Government of West Bengal to oversee the development of Haldia township in Midnapore district of West Bengal. It will be the first government organisation in the state to raise public debt.

Seth, who is also Haldia's representative to the Lok Sabha, told The Financial Express : "We have found that for the development of infrastructure at Haldia, which will include building of roads, bridges, and sewage systems and acquisition of land and its development, we need around Rs 750 crore. The state government will certainly give some amount but not the whole. We are looking into all options and tapping public money is one of those."

When it was pointed out to him that if the authority wanted to raise money from the public the state government would have to stand guarantee, Seth said that it had agreed to do so.

Seth added that the authority had already got the necessary permission from West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu. "After working out the financial necessities of Haldia's infrastructure development, we had a meeting with the Chief Minister and he approved our proposal for tapping public money," he said.

The state government has already given Rs 12 crore to HDA for the township's development and by the end of the current financial year another Rs 38 crore are likely to be sanctioned as loan from the West Bengal Infrastructure Finance Corporation Ltd.

The infrastructure projects that have been chalked out by the HDA are expected to be completed by 2001. "When Haldia Petrochemicals starts commercial production, 500 trucks will be moving through Haldia everyday. So we need to develop the infrastructure within the next two years," Seth said.

Apart from these, the authority has also worked out a water supply project and has already floated global tenders for it. "We have received an overwhelming response for this project. There were 18 bidders from Malaysia, Singapore, the United States, Canada and Israel. Out of them, we shortlisted 12 to 13 and the awardee will be announced at the end of this month," Seth added.

The water supply project will have a capacity of 38 million gallons per day and will cost somewhere around Rs 250 crore. Seth said that the project will be carried out on build-own-transfer (BOT) basis.

"At present, we are working on the technical bidding and it will be followed by the rate bidding. However, we are not worried about the cost as the private party who will build the system will collect the money on our behalf," Seth said.

The authority has already formed a technical committee of experts to study the proposals. Seth said the members of this committee consisted of the professors of IIT, Kharagpur, and Jadavpur University.

However, the Calcutta Municipal Corporation, which perennially suffers from lack of funds, is yet to take any such steps to raise funds.

A member of the mayor-in-council of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation Salil Chattopadhyay recently told The Financial Express: "We are always functioning on funds crunch but we will certainly not tap the public for funds. We will continue to depend on the state government."