Bitter facts

Patna, May 10: In its bid to revive sick sugar factories, state government is contemplating to go for re-bidding of two sugar factories soon.

The factories are located at Hathua and Lohat. Despite three successive bids, the government could hand over only six of the 15 mills of the state sugar corporation to private parties to crush sugarcanes on a lease term. These two factories — Hathua in Gopalganj and Lohat in Madhubani — have enough land for setting up sugar factories and has a crushing capacity of more than 5,000 tonnes per day (TCD).

Sugarcane department’s principal secretary C.K. Mishra told The Telegraph: “Since these two factories have sufficient land for setting up sugar factories, we are contemplating to go for re-bidding of these two units. A final decision on this has not been taken yet but we will do it as soon as possible.” He hinted that the decision could be taken within a month. Mishra said: “We have nine more sick units. We invited bids thrice but still did not find an appropriate offer for the remaining sugar firms. Probably they are not viable for setting up big sugar factories because of space constraints as these firms have just 27 to 35 acres of land, except Hathua and Lohat.”

SBI Caps, government’s consultant, which made the valuation and fixed floor price for bidding, has fixed the floor price of Rs 71.98 crore for Hathua sugar factory, which has around 80 acres of land, whereas Rs 26.14 crore has been fixed as minimum bidding price for Lohat having around 100 acres of land.

Even the consultant had categorically said the rest of the units are not viable to run sugar factories, considering the space constraint, and hence these units should have been used for other industrial purposes.

Mishra said of the 15 sick sugar mills of the corporation, we have signed MoUs for six sugar factories at Rayyam, Motipur, Sakri, Bihta, Sugauli and Lauriya. Of this, two Lauriya and Sugauli have already started crushing sugarcane. We will set up agro-based factories, especially food processing plants in the rest of seven other factories, which have 25 to 35 acres of land.