Gulbarga, south India’s dal bowl, will soon have a Dal Park set up under the public private partnership (PPP) mode at an estimated cost of Rs 100 crore to support tur dal growers and farmers. This first of its kind park, will be set up through a special purpose vehicle (SPV) to be floated between the dal mill owners, state and central government agencies.
“The project has been jointly conceived by the Gulbarga Dal Mills Association and Karnataka Small Scale Industries Association.
The state minister for large and medium industries Murugesh R Nirani has accepted our proposal in-principle and agreed to allocate 100 acres land to set up cluster-based Dal Park in south India,” S S Biradar, former president, Kassia said.
He said, the government has agreed to allot land through the Karnataka Industrial Areas Development Board (KIADB) at Kapanur village, near Gulbarga.
The state government has also agreed to create required infrastructure for the park. It has been decided to approach either the Union Ministry of Food Processing or Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion (DIPP) under the ministry of commerce for grant-in-aid to set up the project under a cluster-based model, he said.
There are about 222 dal mills in and around Gulbarga and all of them have come forward to become members of the SPV and invest the required amount towards their equity, which is still to be worked out.
The proposed park would also help dal millers across the Hyderabad-Karnataka region including neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, he said.
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We are working towards registering the SPV within the next month and once the SPV is formed we will appoint a consultant to prepare the detailed project report. All this will be done in the next one or two months and approach the state and Central governments for necessary clearances,” Biradar told Business Standard.
At the proposed Dal Park, the dal mills will get a piece of plot to set up their processing units and there will some common facilities like drying yard, testing lab, quality control lab, marketing assistance centre and x-ray machines to separate stones among others.
Biradar said that the Park would generate at least 2,000 direct and 5,000 indirect jobs apart from helping both the mill owners and farmers. Apart from tur dal, the park will also process other pulses like green gram, urad, and black gram and Bengal gram among others.
Karnataka accounts for 20 per cent of the national area under tur (red gram) cultivation. For the present kharif, the state agriculture department has targeted 860,000 hectares under tur crop. With an average production of about five quintals per hectare, the state can expect 4.3 million quintals of tur output for the present kharif.
However, due to the lack of proper storage facilities and processing units, both the farmer and dal mills are forced to sell their produce early, thereby losing an opportunity to earn more every year, a dal miller from Gulbarga said.