Agra delicacy pushed out of city limits

Besides being the source of livelihood for several thousand Agra residents, petha, a world-renowned delicacy manufactured by more than 700 cottage units of the town, has also generated a serious waste management problem for Agra.

To combat the continuous outflow of petha waste from almost 700 small and mid-scale petha-manufacturing units, concentrated in the Noori Gate area of the town, the Agra administration has decided to develop a "petha complex" just outside the city, providing the petha-manufacturing units ample space on the Agra-Delhi national highway.

Talking to Business Standard on Monday, Ashok Kumar, Agra commissioner and chairman, Agra Development Authority, said the petha industry of Agra consumed several hundred trucks of ripe petha fruits every day during the petha-manufacturing season and a major part of these fruits was reduced to bio-waste after processing and it was this waste that gave rise to a serious waste-management problem for the town, which is already facing difficulty in managing its almost 100-year-old sewage system.

He said a project of generating energy from this bio-waste had been introduced in the town by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) under its clean technology initiative (CTI) Project but it was hardly successful and could not prove to be a good enough solution to get rid of about 30 to 35 tonnes of waste every day that is generated by these petha units in the heart of the city.

He said that unable to efficiently remove the petha waste from deep inside the city to the trenching grounds almost 10-15 km away, the Agra administration had decided to relocate the Petha industry to the outskirts of the town and the Agra Development Authority had been instructed to develop the necessary infrastructure at the "petha complex" in its Kalindi Vihar project on the Agra-Delhi national highway to facilitate this shifting, which is expected to begin by the end of September.

He said after the relocation of the petha units, the Agra Municipal Corporation shall take up the task of converting the Petha waste into organic compost and this compost shall be then marketed through the government agencies to the local farmers.

But the petha manufacturers of Agra do not seem too happy at the decision of the administration to relocate them.

Subhash Goyal, owner of a number of petha-manufacturing units of Agra under the brandname "Panchhi Petha", said the Agra Development Authority had so far been unsuccessful in developing infrastructure for any industry that has been shifted to a new area of the city or outside and there was no guarantee that this new petha complex would deliver anything worthwhile to the petha manufacturers.

He said relocating this Rs 600 crore industry outside the city could also mean the relocation of thousands of people who worked in the petha units as they could not afford to travel more than 15 kilometres every day just to reach their place of work.