ITC's Bengal food project in land tangle

Plans Rs 1000 crore new hotel property

Diversified business conglomerate, ITC Ltd, which planned to invest Rs 300 crore in a food park in West Bengal, said today it was disappointed with the West Bengal government due to delay in delivery of 40 acres that the company had sought for.

Y C Deveshwar, chairman of ITC Ltd, said on the sidelines of the company’s 98th annual general meeting (AGM), “We want to invest in the state but we get frustrated when projects do not progress on time due to delay in providing us land.”

The West Bengal government had identified 40 acres at Panchla village in Howrah on National Highway 6, 35km west of Kolkata, for the proposed ITC unit. The price quoted to ITC for the land was around Rs 50 lakh per acre.

The proximity of the proposed site to the major potato-growing belt of Hooghly had already attracted a number of food processing units to the area, which was located between the NH6, better known as the Mumbai-Chennai highway, and NH2, the new name for the Kolkata-Delhi Grand Trunk Road.

PepsiCo had operations up and running in the area while a local group called Pailan was setting up another unit in the Howrah-Hooghly belt. Smaller foods units like Elmac and Bisk Farm were located in the area as well. Being close to Kolkata, yet in the heart of the state’s most prosperous farming zone, the area was also favoured by investors because it had numerous cold storages and elaborate network of roads and train lines.

The total investment in the plant was supposed to have been Rs 300 crore, and it would had mainly catered to the ITC snacks line, Bingo. ITC's other agri-retail initiatives in the state, like e-choupal network of interconnected farm products buying and selling platforms, would depend on the successful operations of the plant.

ITC chairman Y C Deveshwar had also indicated earlier that the company was unable to start an agri-cum-food project in West Bengal, as the state was yet to the provide land.

“However, we are investing Rs 1,000 crore to build a new 470-room hotel spread over 1.2 million sq ft, adjacent to our existing hotel in Kolkata on the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass,” said Deveshwar