Calcutta, Jan 21 :     The Centre has decided to lease out six jute mills of the ailing public sector National Jute Manufactures Corporation (NJMC) to private firms. It said earlier this week conversion agents would be appointed for the mills. The move has generated a lot of enthusiasm among private jute mill-owners, raw jute suppliers and jute-goods traders. A number of jute mill-owners, especially the industry leader Arun Bajoria, have been trying to take over the NJMC mills. The government's move might make it easy for him and others to tap their huge capacity. Though NJMC has said preference will be given to public sector undertakings, state government companies and workers' co-operatives, trade sources say said there is little hope that they will be keen to act as conversion agents. The contracts, which would be given for the current jute year ending in June, will primarily cover conversion of raw jute to sacking, hessian and yarns. These could be renewed after the five-month test-run, depending on the performance of conversion agents. All but one of the NJMC mills with capacities ranging from 200 tonnes per day to 48 tonnes per day are located around Calcutta. The smallest one, the 28-tonne per day RBHM Mill, is in Bihar. B.M. Mahapatra, who took over as chairman and managing director of NJMC earlier this month, told The Telegraph several key jute players were interested in tapping the corporation's idle capacity by taking them on lease. The NJMC mills have been out of production since October last year after raw jute traders stopped supplies. NJMC owes them Rs 33 crore while its dues to the Jute Corporation of India stand at a whopping Rs 200 crore. Since November, the Centre stopped providing funds for salaries. The corporation, which has a combined daily capacity of 525 tonnes, has an accumulated loss of Rs 1,300 crore and has been losing Rs 120 crore annually in the past 10 years. Mahapatra said appointing conversion agents was the only way the corporation could maintain machines and pay wages to more than 21,000 workers. Almost 10,000 workers have either retired or opted for a voluntary retirement package in the past 10 years. In his previous stint at National Textile Corporation (NTC), Mahapatra had introduced a similar conversion arrangement at NTC's units in the eastern region. Under Mahapatra, who is also the chairman and managing director of NTC's eastern region subsidiary, ten of the 16 mills here were given away to the yarn dealers in the Sutapatty area of the city. The arrangement had functioned smoothly without much resistance from trade unions. Workers of NTC mills working under conversion agents get their wages on time. In other divisions, including in the head-office, the payment of salaries and wages are delayed by over a month. However, trade unions are unlikely to allow the conversion arrangement to be implemented in NJMC as smoothly as it was done in NTC. The central trade unions in the jute sector are meeting to discuss ways to block the lease-out of NJMC mills.