KHURDA: In about a year and a half after getting the State Government’s approval for a food park and a five-star hotel, ITC Limited, a multi-business conglomerate unveiled the projects at Khurda here on Thursday. Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik attended the ground breaking ceremony of the projects which will be setup with an estimated capital of over Rs 800 crore.
The integrated consumer goods manufacturing facility will be built over 16 acre land. The facility will manufacture ITC’s food brands such as Aashirvaad, Bingo, Sunfeast and YiPPee!. The food manufacturing unit will be built with an investment of Rs 675 crore and ITC would develop and source raw material within the catchments area of the factory subject to the agro-climatic conditions. The company will absorb graduates from technical institutes in and around Khurda district and other parts of the State, sources said.
Addressing the occasion, Naveen said, the presence of ITC, one of India’s largest and most diversified conglomerates will be a landmark to the food processing sector in Odisha and generate employment for over 1100 persons. "Over time I expect that ITC would further expand its unit and make it the largest manufacturing unit in country and transform Khurda unit into the distribution centre for Eastern and North-eastern India,” Naveen said.
Construction for the hotel has already started and the food processing plant will start by January 2017. Both the facilities will come up in two and a half year time, Chief Operating Officer, ITC Ltd Sanjiv Puri said. “The hotel project has been estimated at Rs 135 crore. Odisha has immense tourism and business potential which can be well complemented by the upcoming five-star facility of ITC’s Welcome brand in Bhubaneswar,” he added.
ITC's FMCG businesses support livelihoods for over 7 lakh people in the State. The company has been supporting farmers to try new table potato varieties by providing agronomy support and supplying early generation seed potato and in Cuttack, Mayurbhanj, Bhadrak, Balasore, Puri and Koraput districts, Puri added.
Social Agro-Forestry Project:
There is a proposed bridge from Motu to Kota in Chhattisgarh which will make Malkangiri district a catchment area for raw material (pulpwood) for ITC's paperboard factory in Bhadrachalam in Telengana.
In anticipation of the bridge coming up, ITC has piloted a project of social agro-forestry in Malkangiri by distributing fast-growing Eucalyptus saplings to farmers. Currently, the saplings are planted over 60 acres land. The company has plans to scale up the existing agro and social forestry programme to 250 acres by the end of 2017.
Over the years the project would expand upto 10,000 hectares and every year 4000 hectares will be added. The 4000 hectares will create two million man-days of employment and it is going to multiply farmer incomes by four to six times as the area is rain fed, ITC sources projected.(