RIL sets sights on new-age farms

High-yield crops figure in Mukesh Ambani's retailing plans.

Reliance Industries is in the process of taking on lease thousands of acres of land across the country to use latest technologies and procedures to increase agriculture productivity, top company executives have said.

The company's plans for a mega foray into the farm sector fits in well with its huge retail ambitions, and will be a backward integration for its distribution chain. Reliance Industries has already done the preliminary work at its Jamnagar refinery and wants to replicate it elsewhere.

Executives said today the company had already held talks with many state governments on leasing of land and had positive offers from many of them. The company essentially wants to do a Wal-Mart in India, and completely integrate supply with delivery.

"We started this a few years ago, along with the refinery," said an executive at the Jamnagar refinery, pointing to the 1,800-acre mega-orchard that produced everything, from mangoes and capsicum to bamboos and timber.

"The idea was to try this out first as an experiment and later scale it up when the opportunity comes."

The opportunity, according to Reliance Industries mandarins, has finally come, with the company getting ready to open as many as 800 retail outlets across the country. Since food will account for around 40 per cent of the company's retail operations, it can sell fruits and vegetables grown on its own land through the outlets.

Going by the initial results of the company's infusion of "scientific technology" into farming at its Jamnagar premises, the results have been encouraging.

"We have more than a lakh of mango trees in our mango orchard here, the largest in Asia. While the normal density of this crop in our country is around 40 trees per acre, it is no less than 333 here," said the executive.

"Soon, we will increase it to 1,332 per acre," he added.