Liquidator Appointed For Western Paques
Western Paques India Ltd, the flagship of the once Rs 300-crore Gadgil Western group, has literally collapsed with an official appointed for its liquidation last month.
According to documents available with Business Standard, the corporate headquarters of the group at Pune, `Western House off Prabhat Road are in the possession of the official liquidator.
The flagship, which is a joint venture with the Holland-based group, Paques, for production of power from municipal solid waste, has come undone after the technology from the Dutch group was not relevant for Indian conditions.
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According to sources close to the company, the official liquidator had been appointed after the company could not meet its liabilities and repay its debts. The appointment of the liquidator will ensure that the assets of the company are sold, possibly through auctions, the debts recovered and the creditors are paid off.
Meanwhile, the companys project at Dhapa, near Calcutta, hangs in limbo. While the project seems to have been abandoned, the company is yet to return the land it had acquired for its project of power generation from garbage. The Calcutta Municipal Corporation is yet to receive any official intimation from the company regarding the issue. The companys managing director, Biplab Bose, put in his papers last year after it was intimated to him that the project would not take off, say sources.
The project seemed to be unviable as the Paques technology and the anaerobic process with incineration needed to be modified a great deal as Indian garbage has a high moisture content and a large quantum of bio-degradable material. Segregation of the waste was a big problem, says a former employee of the organisation.
Sources point out that the flagship company had signed 18 memoranda of understanding with various municipalities for such projects all over the country. Except for one pilot plant in Pune, none of them have seen the light of the day. Some of the MoUs that had been signed were with municipalities of Kochi, Calcutta, Ludhiana, Madurai, Nagpur and Vijaywada.
Corporate watchers attribute the groups collapse to too much of unrelated diversification in too short a time (within 4 to 5 years) into fields that required long gestation and payback periods, and with no core competencies to fall back on. The areas to where the group had ventured into was power (from municipal solid waste), sugar, shipping, industrial parks, lubricants and refinery.