Rana Sugars to invest Rs 39 crore

Amritsar-based Rana Sugars Ltd, part of the Rana group, is coming up with a distillery unit with a capacity to produce 65 kilolitres per day, or 4,000 cases of country liquor, with an initial investment of around Rs 39 crore at Patti, Amritsar. The new plant is likely to start operation by next week and will be spread over 33 acres.

The company will be utilising molasses, a by-product of its sugar and grain products, for the manufacture of rectified spirit, ethanol and potable alcohol. The new unit will also have the infrastructure for captive power generation of 1.6 Mw, meant for captive consumption.

Initially, the company will manufacture country liquor and then it would foray into Indian Made Foreign Liquor in October. The project is funded partly by promoters' money and partly by banks. Once this unit is operational, this will be the second distillery in Amritsar after the Khasa distillery.

The existing sugar unit is an integrated sugar plant with the capacity to crush 5,000 tonnes of sugarcane per day and facilities for the co-generation of 20 Mw, situated at Village Buttar Sevian, District Amritsar. The setting up of the distillery will enable the company to fully integrate its operations. Its existing sugar plant produces 200 tonnes of molasses per day.

Speaking to Business Standard, company Director Rana Inder Pratap Singh said, "This plant will be a pollution-free unit. We are importing machinery from China, in which 50 per cent of wash and impurities will be evaporated and the remaining would be burnt in boilers, without polluting the environment. "So, it would be the first-of-its-kind distillery having zero pollution content," he said.

He said, "Initially we will use molasses as raw material; after three months we would use grain for production purposes." He said there was huge potential for country liquor in Punjab because it was consumed by masses. "The surge in demand has motivated us to venture into this profitable business."

Moreover, we have a sugar unit and hence have an edge over other units as far as raw materials are concerned."

Singh said, "Once the new unit is fully operational, we are hopeful of achieving a turnover of Rs 65-70 crore in the next fiscal, from the distillery."

Besides the sugar industry, the group has diversified businesses in textiles, informatics, and infrastructure. In this fiscal, the group is expecting Rs 300 crore as turnover, while in the last fiscal the turnover of the group was Rs 250 crore.