Calcutta, Oct. 18: The developers of a large food park in Bengal’s Jangipur — the constituency of finance minster Pranab Mukherjee — are finding it difficult to acquire the 100 acres required for the project.

“Acquiring land is the main problem. Though the developers had managed to get about 30-40 acres, conversion of the plots into use for industrial purpose was not possible,” said a source from LMJ International, one of the developers. “There are a lot of other issues which are restricting the developers to go ahead with the project,” the source said.

The project was one of the 10 large food parks cleared by the Centre across the country last November to speed up growth in the farm sector. The Centre has plans to put up 30 such food parks by the end of the 11th Five Year Plan (2007-12), for which it will be doling out Rs 1,500 crore as a subsidy (Rs 50 crore for each park) to the developers.

Besides Jangipur in Murshidabad district, some of the other proposed food parks are at Dharampura in Tamil Nadu, Rai Bareli in Uttar Pradesh, Chettur in Andhra Pradesh and Ranchi in Jharkhand.

City-based Rs 2,000 crore LMJ International has bagged the right to develop three parks in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Orissa.

“Our other food parks in Orissa and Tamil Nadu are expected to be operational in April-May 2010. But, I cannot comment anything about the Jangipur project,” LMJ International managing director S.K. Jain told The Telegraph.

All the food parks will be developed in a public-private partnership model, where the government’s holding will not exceed 26 per cent. A special purpose vehicle will be floated to execute the projects. Each of the parks will come up on an area of 110-200 acres, with a minimum capital outlay of Rs 125 crore.

The parks would accommodate 30-35 units, and the larger ones might accommodate up to 100 units as well, Jain said. He said a food park could give direct and indirect employment to as many as 30,000 people.

The West Bengal State Food Processing and Horticulture Development Corporation and the Central Warehousing Corporation are the government partners in the Jangipur project.

Sankrail woe

LMJ International’s proposed Rs 550-crore food park at Sankrail in Bengal has also been put on hold because of land problems.

“We have the land in hand but there, too, was the problem in converting the plots for use for industrial purposes,” Jain said.