Infra, electricity hope rise as Centre-state power aligns in UP

PLUGGING INTO THE NEEDS OF UTTAR PRADESH

Uttar Pradesh (UP) may be grabbing headlines for cow politics and Romeo squads but for India Inc, the state means business, more so as the new state government is showing early signs of getting its act together in the road and power sectors.

In its run-up to the Assembly elections, UP has seen significant activity in the road sector. Most analysts expect this momentum will be carried forward because of the Lok Sabha elections of 2019.

“UP and Karnataka have seen the highest number of projects this year, and Odisha, UP, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh have seen a regular flow of projects,” according to an Equirus Capital report on the upcoming project pipelines and recent bidding activity in the road sector for April-December 2016.

“The previous UP government gave a lot of push to infrastructure in the last 15-18 months. With the same party in power in the state and the Centre, both funding and the approval process will ease for road projects,” said Shubham Jain, vicepresident at Icra.

Officials of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) say there are some signs of improvement in UP. “There has been some improvement, and land acquisition and forest clearance are getting expedited,” said an NHAI official.

According to the Press Information Bureau data, as on June 10, 2016, nine projects had missed their commissioning date. Another 10 were awaiting a no-objection certificate from the state government.

Not just roads, power producers may also anticipate changes with informal discussions having started on ways to ease power procurement. For the April 2016 to February 2017 period, 9.8 per cent (1,682 megawatt) of the state’s power demand was not met, against the all-India average of 1.6 per cent. For the April- December 2016 period, Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Karnataka witnessed the highest project bidding activity For the April-February 2017 period, UP had 1,682 megawatt, or 9.8%, of power deficit PNC Infratech, L&T and Sadbhav Engineering likely to gain from UP infra, power push