With property prices skyrocketing across the country, there are suspicions that the government is covertly leveraging its sez policy to benefit realtors Prominent industrialist Rahul Bajaj charges the developers with turning these zones into a land scam in their zest to secure tax holidays. Scoffing at any comparisons between sezs in India and those in China, he points out that land on which the latter are established is owned by the state and the benefits go directly to the people, while in India it is the developer who benefits the most. He also sees little point in industrialising areas in the proximity of existing cities, as with sezs coming up in Navi Mumbai, Chennai, Noida and Hyderabad, arguing that it is infrastructure created in the hinterland that can promote auxiliary settlements. At times, the authorities themselves operate as land sharks, buying land from farmers at a pittance and then reselling to developers at a premium. The Industrial Development Corporation of Orissa purchased land from farmers in Kalinganagar in Jajpur district at Rs30,000 per acre, but transferred it to Tata Steel at Rs335,000 per acre. The resultant agitation by the shortchanged tribals led to police firing in January 2006 in which 12 were killed. The government, however, Claims the sezs are creating wealth for land-owning farmers in their vicinity as property prices have escalated once the projects are announced. Kishore Babu, cfo of Hyderabad-based Divi's Laboratories Ltd, says his company already possessed the 105 hectares of land it needed for its sector-specific sez for bulk drugs, specialty chemicals and 'nutraceuticals'. Exports constitute over 90 per cent of Divi's business and it is projecting them to grow to over Rsl ,000 crore within the next five years, from Rs53 crore in 2006-07. Mundra sez vice-president Bhavin Shah mentions that 5,947 acres of his company's holding of 15,665 acres have already been notified as the multi-product sez. "There was minimal acquisition as the major part was barren coastal wasteland," he remarks. According to Subrat Sengupta, senior manager at Mahindra World City, four of the 27 companies setting up shop there are already functioning, employing a total of 5,000 people - half of them women -and exporting goods worth Rs500 crore since the Chennai-based sez's notification in April 2005. Billed as 'India's first integrated business city', the zone will be a cluster of three sezs straddling 3,000 hectares, with the it sez employing 85,000, the apparel sez, 10,000, and the auto sez, 5,000. "We anticipate Rs5,000 crore worth of exports by 2011-12," he adds. Nokia India director Sachin Saxena says his company's factory took just half a year to build and has already notched up exports worth Rsl ,650 crore since becoming operational in January 2006. Its workforce has grown from 550 to over 3,800 at present, nearly 2,600 of them being women. He sees the sez generating jobs for 30,000 at the units of Nokia and its suppliers by end-2008. Vivek Rachh, of eon infrastructure, says his company has already invested a fourth of the Rs800 crore it has budgeted for its unit in the it sez in Kharadi near Pune. The facility has around 150 executives, engineers and technical consultants, apart from 2,500 labourers engaged in its construction. The government has not capped the number of sezs on the reasoning that they are coming up through investments by private players who will evidently be guided by market requirements. Both site and size too are to be decided by the developer, though minimum areas have been prescribed for the various sez categories.