INDIAN ECONOMY SEES RECORD FALL

NEW DELHI: The Indian economy declined by a record 23.9% in the first quarter of 2020-21 (April-June), reflecting the economic cost of the complete lockdown imposed to fight the spread of the Covid-19 that was in place in April and May, the first two months of the period. The contraction, the worst on record, was sharper than estimated by economists.

LUCKNOW: The Uttar Pradesh government has decided to tweak the timeline a bit to complete the process of bidding to appoint a consultant for development of industrial parks in Varanasi, Gorakhpur, Agra, Kanpur, Moradabad and Azamgarh. The government will also come out with an amended Expression of Interest (EoI) and Request for Proposal (RFP) for the project. Additional chief secretary, micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), Navneet Sehgal said, “We are going to come out with an amended EoI-cum-RFP and a new timeline for the bids for appointment of consultant for development of these industrial parks for MSMEs.” “We will come out with the new EoI-cum- RFP after incorporating the suggestions made by leading consultants who attended the pre-bid conference held on August 19, 2020. A high level committee will consider these suggestions,” he added. An officer of the directorate of industries and enterprise promotion said the state government proposed to appoint the consultant to identify the areas and feasibility for development of these parks in order to provide an industrial eco system to the existing units and attract new investment on the public private partnership (PPP) model. “We are amending the bid documents to incorporate the standard format for the PPP model for development of these parks and come out with a new schedule,” said Sehgal. As per the original schedule, the state government proposed to start the bid submissions from July 28, hold the pre-bid conference on August 19 and open the technical bids on August 27. To a question, the officer said, “We got a good response. But we did not proceed as changes are being made in the contents of the Expression of Interest-cum-Request for Proposal documents provided earlier.” The state government had recently decided to tweak the timelines set to achieve the objective of making Uttar Pradesh a trillion-dollar economy in five years following a move to amend the request for proposal (RFP) and timelines to accommodate suggestions made at the online pre-bid meeting held on June 29.