Mega food park near Phagwara to start operations soon

Phagwara: The soon-to-open mega food park , which is coming up in Rehana Jattan village, 15km from Phagwara on the Phagwara-Hoshiarpur road, is expected to create a huge demand for maize in Doaba region. This could help Punjab push through its crop diversification plan, which is being floated as an alternative to water-guzzling paddy.

The park has the capacity to process more than two lakh tonne of maize annually.

Sanctioned by the Union ministry of food processing industries, the work on the mega food park, being established by Sukhjit Starch and Chemicals started in July 2017. It has capacity to consume maize from over 90,000 acre.

Food park director Bhavdeep Sardana said the project is in its advance stage of commissioning and is expected to commence its operations by last quarter of the current financial year. “We are also establishing the anchor unit with capacity of 600 tonne per day maize processing,” he said.

“Besides creating affordable infrastructure for the food processing industry, the park will also act as a catalyst for facilitating direct procurement of various crops, including perishables from farmers to benefit them. The park will also have a state-of-the-art cold chain to enhance the shelf life of perishable produce of farmers and three ultra modern silos with storage capacity of around 60,000 tonne to store the produce of farmers. We have have set up three primary procurement centres at village Mahuwal in Jalandhar, Dheron in Hoshiarpur and Ballan Manjhpur in Amritsar for facilitating the farmers to sell their produce and subsequently ensuring its warehouse,” said Sardana.