Jayashree Chemicals settles row with salt farmers

Jayashree Chemicals Limited (JCL), a caustic soda producing company based in south Orissa's Ganjam district has claimed to have settled the row over purchase of salt from the farmers in the district by agreeing to procure the commodity at Rs 1050 per tonne.

The salt farmers in the district have been agitating for the past three months. They had demanded that salt needs to be procured from them at Rs 1250 per tonne, the price fixed at a high-level meeting held in August under the chairmanship of the Revenue Divisional Commission (RDC), Berhampur.

The company, however, was reluctant to procure at this price, stating that the salt was of poor quality. “The matter was resolved amicably and we offered to buy salt at Rs 1050 per tonne”, a senior official of JCL told Business Standard. Salt is the raw material used for producing caustic soda and the JCL is the only caustic soda producing plant in the state located near Ganjam town, about 40 km from here . Around 25,000 tonnes of salt were stocked with over 20,000 salt farmers in the district including the Humma-Binchhanapalli Salt Producers Cooperative Society (HBSPC).

Around 25,000 hectares in the district was earmarked for the salt production, which is the highest salt producing area in the state. said, the society has about 5000 tonnes of stocked salt and the sale of salt was necessary to procure salt for the next year. K Duryodhana Reddy, secretary of the HBSPCS said, his society has about 5,000 tonnes of stocked salt and his society is willing to sell it to JCL.

Besides procuring salt from the local farmers, the JCL also gets salt from Gujarat and from its own salt farm near Surala in Ganjam district to run its 70 tonne capacity plant. The company was procuring salt from other states as the state could not meet the demand. The company's plant required around 48,000 tonnes of salt per annum but got about half of this quantity from the state.