The rush for SEZs started after the announcement of the SEZ rules on 10 February 2006. There was no inkling of this dash when the late Mr Murasoli Maran, India's former Commerce Minister, announced the SEZ policy in April 2000. Thereafter too, there was hardly any haste among developers to build these zones even when the Exim Policy for 2002–7 increased the fiscal benefits for SEZ units, or when the Foreign Trade Policy for 2004–9 emphasized their importance. Commenting on SEZs, an editorial in the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) of 5 April 2003 mentioned: ‘The plan to set up SEZs was announced in 2000, in a bid to emulate China's spectacular success in boosting exports from its special economic zones. However, the implementation of the SEZ project has so far not been conspicuously successful. As Jaitley himself acknowledges, most of the projects are still bogged down, mainly by delays in land acquisition’.

Since 10 February 2006, the Board of Approval (BoA), which is empowered to approve SEZs, has met 13 times till 5 June 2007. On each occasion, it has examined proposals forwarded by different state governments, as well as those submitted to it directly by developers. Over the last one year, as SEZs slowly started moving into the eye of the storm, popular attention began zeroing in on the regional distribution of these zones.