NEC to make recommendations on idle plantation lands in May
The state-run National Economic Council (NEC) will gather information on idle lands in state owned plantations in a bid to decide on how to make them more productive.
Some information on the original scope of work was submitted to the NEC on April 1, a senior NEC official told the Business Times noting that during the rest of this month NEC will be ‘digging’ for more data.
Officials at the Ministry of Public Enterprise, Kandyan Heritage and Kandyan Development told the Business Times that a couple of months ago NEC was to give a recommendation on the vetting of proposals for idle lands in state-owned plantation companies. This is still in the works.
Since the political standoff last year nothing was done on this matter, an NEC official noted adding that afterwards the plantation subject was moved around to different ministries and secretaries at those ministries also changed. “Now the NEC is trying to get hold of secretaries and ministries to obtain more information.” He added this month the NEC will have meetings with relevant ministries and decide on the next course of action to be executed by next month.
Two years ago the Ministry of Public Enterprise received 252 proposals for various slots of 50,000 hectares of idle land. At the time, they were forwarded to the National Agency for Public Private Partnership (NAFPPP) under the Finance Ministry to expedite the required agreements in consultation with the Attorney General’s Department. “The proposals to NAFPPP are on maximising productivity and plans to make them efficient and we want to go for multiple partnerships. The positive side at the time was that there was huge interest from locals, big companies, wanting to take over parts of the companies and do various projects,” the Ministry of Public Enterprise, Kandyan Heritage and Kandyan Development official said.
NAFPPP was set up to select projects based on the public-private partnership collaboration, their implementation and to provide guidance to the Ministries and other state institutions in respect of such projects. It has additional powers to identify suitable projects based on feasibility studies and maintain a ‘project pipeline’ in consultation with government ministries.