A senior Andhra government official has already held a preliminary meeting with company officials last week on the modalities of sale of six cooperative spinning mills.

Sona Textiles, Paravaidyta Mills, Rajashree Textiles, ATL Textiles, Sutlej industries and Balaji Industries are the companies which have evinced keen interest in grabbing their shares of the takeover pie.

The Andhra Pradesh government plans to privatise six coopreative spinning mills located at Nandyal, Sircilla, Adilabad, Nellore, Karimnagar and Rajahmundry.

While four mills have capacities of 25,000 spindles each, there are two smaller mills with capacities of only 12,000 each.

The initial valuation has put the price tentatively in the range of Rs 12-25 crore, ICICI sources said.

Around 16companies have already bought the application forms for tenders and the last date for submitting the tenders is October 15, said institutional sources.

ICICI, acting to implement an unprecedented offer by the government of Andhra Pradesh led by Chandrababu Naidu to speed up takeovers of sick textile firms, had already conducted roadshows in Coimbatore and Ahmedabad and Mumbai was the last one in the list.

Roadshows were successful and a final decision regarding the takeover will be take shortly, said ICICI sources.

The enthusiastic response to the offer is believed to be an offshoot of the lucrative incentives that the Andhra government was wiling to dole out. Also, the takeover will be purely asset transfer and government will set off the liabilities.

However, the concessions will only be for those companies which agree to run the mills for a minimum period of five years, institutional sources said.

The Andhra government's move is in line with the chief minister Chandrababu Naidu's policy ofallowing private investments in all the sectors.

Incidentally, Chandrababu Naidu has been rolling out red carpet for private-sector players and has been attracting a lot of foreign investments in infrastructure.

Industry observers say that the textile firms will be hardput to bring in the money for the takeover as the textile industry itself is passing through its worst-ever crisis.

They also said that this is for the first time that a state government in the country is offering such a large-scale private participation in the cooperative sector.