Minister for agriculture Rohidas Patil and Agricultural Products Export Development Agency (APEDA) chairman Anil Swarup on Monday signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for developing a Rs 26 crore flower auction house and central wholesale market in Mumbai.
The auction house and wholesale market will be built on three acres of land in the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) campus at Goregaon. The project, for which APEDA subsidy would be available to the tune of Rs 5 crore, was on the cards for last five years.
In fact, in 1996 a memorandum of understanding (MoU) was also entered into by APEDA and the Maharashtra Marketing Board (MMB), but the scheme failed to take off then.
The MoU signing ceremony was attended among others by principal secretary (industries) Vishwas Dhumal; secretary (agriculture) Shivajirao Deshmukh and MAIDC managing director, Rajkumar Zutshi.
Mumbai, despite being a major market for flowers, lacks a central flower auction house and wholesale market. Auctions and wholesale calls are conducted at different places across the city making the whole process cumbersome and fraught with mismanagement.
It is hoped that the proposed project will meet a long-felt demand of dealers and flower lovers.
In another development, trailers and container-mounted trailers plying on the Mumbai-Pune National Highway No 4 have been diverted to the Mumbai-Nashik Highway. The decision, however, would not apply to trailers and container-mounted trailers carrying export oriented perishable commodities.
Easing passenger traffic on the highway has been cited as the official reason for the diversion that would be in place for a month on an experimental basis, according to a government release.
