The Uttar Pradesh government has started work on its plan to set up new industrial, residential and commercial townships in Bundelkhand to develop the sparsely-populated region synonymous with parched landmass and teeming job-seekers on the lines of Noida.
Noida was conceived in the 1970s and went on to transform the Western UP’s landscape for good.
Akin to the New Okhla Industrial Development Authority (Noida), the Yogi Adityanath government has instituted the Bundelkhand Industrial Development Authority (BIDA) with its epicentre in Jhansi.
The government will pitch for private and public sector investments in billions of dollars once the basic infrastructure is ready.
In the first phase of development, 35,000 acres of land worth more than Rs 6,000 crore, spanning 33 revenue villages in the Jhansi district will be acquired.
The process of land acquisition will start soon.
While industrial development is at the core of BIDA, it will also feed the state’s 1 trillion dollar economy target.
A total of Rs 8,000 crore has been earmarked for land acquisition, out of which about Rs 5,000 crore will be spent on BIDA.
Two other mega projects Bundelkhand Expressway and UP Defence Corridor, which have nodes in Jhansi and Chitrakoot districts of the Bundelkhand region, will help BIDA to emerge as a major industrial hub in North India.
So far, 1,000 hectares of land have been provided to defence manufacturing investors in the Jhansi node of the defence corridor, where Bharat Dynamics is the lead investor.
Jhansi is being developed as a hub for the production and testing of arms and ammunition.
The composite Bundelkhand region spans nearly 69,000 square kilometres across seven districts in UP (Chitrakoot, Banda, Jhansi, Jalaun, Hamirpur, Mahoba and Lalitpur) and six districts in MP (Chhatarpur, Tikamgarh, Damoh, Sagar, Datia and Panna).
Geographically, UP and MP comprise roughly 40 per cent and 60 per cent of Bundelkhand’s population with the UP region being more densely populated than that of MP part.
Recently, the maiden board meeting of BIDA was held in Jhansi under the chairmanship of UP’s additional chief secretary Manoj Kumar Singh, who is also the UP agricultural production commissioner, infrastructure and industrial development commissioner.
He said the immediate focus was on land acquisition and hiring a global consultant to prepare a master plan to develop industrial and commercial enclaves.
Last month, UP finance minister Suresh Khanna, while interacting with top industrialists and investors in Lucknow, underscored that BIDA was on course to script a Noida-like success story for the landlocked state.
Meanwhile, the UP government is also planning to develop a string of new townships at the periphery of big urban centres to decongest major cities and provide affordable housing to the people.
