A seven-member committee set up by BJD chief and Minister of Steel and Mines Naveen Patnaik in April to prepare a base report on the demand for special status has almost finalised the draft report and the party was expected to submit a memorandum to the Centre by the end of August.

Chairman of the drafting committee and leader of Opposition Ramkrushna Patnaik's recent disclosure that the report demanded a 30-year moratorium on repayment of loans has attracted criticism from a section of partymen.

Patnaik said in a press conference at Cuttack recently that such a measure would be in Orissa's interest since the debt burden of the state had mounted to 13,500 crore rupees, while the annual interest on central loans had reached 1,700 crore rupees.

But senior party MLA Amar PrasadSatpathy has strongly differed with Patnaik on the issue saying the demand for moratorium was being raised only to dilute the demand for special category status. Satpathy, one of the party general secretaries, is known to be close to BJD's Political Affairs Committee (PAC) Chairman Bijoy Mohapatra, whose differences with Naveen Patnaik are well known.

Mohapatra is also one of the members of the committee for drafting the report. His comments on the issue was not available as he is out of station. The committee's views had a striking resemblance with Chief Minister J B Patnaik's stand that the Centre should provide relief to Orissa to tide over its financial problems or sanction an interest free medium-term loan till a decision on conferring special status on the state was taken.

``The demand for moratorium on loans will not serve any purpose. If they wanted, they should have demanded complete waiver of loans as it had happened in Punjab,'' Satpathy said. Another BJD MLA, Panchanan Kanungo has alsoexpressed his reservation on the demand for moratorium on loans. ``Demands like the moratorium would provide the Centre an escape route when all efforts were needed to be made to extract the special category status demand from the Centre,'' he said. The BJD had stated in its election manifesto that it would fight for special category status for Orissa and it should not be diluted in any manner, Satpathy said adding the party could not compromise on such a key issue.