The Mega Food Park in Getalsud located in State Capital is non-functional for past one year since the food park was inaugurated with much fan fare in 2016. The park is closed after the untimely death of Nitin Shenoy one of the major promoters of the food park. After the death of Shenoy in Dubai, the promoter Jharkhand Mega Food Park Pvt Ltd pulled its hand from food park. The withdrawal of Jharkhand Mega Food Park Pvt from the venture left other promoters too to shift from project with the project finally getting closed.
Rajya Sabha MP Mahesh Poddar few days back raised the issue of closure of Mega Food Park in Rajya Sabha. Poddar at Rajya Sabha expressed disappointment over not opening of Mega Food Park, Cold Chain, Value Added Structure, Agro Processing Cluster Infrastructure and Preservation Capacity Unit in the State under Pradhan Mantri Kisan Sampda Yojana (PMKSY) introduced by the Government of India.
On February 2016, in order to give an impetus to the growth of the food processing sector in State, the first mega food park in the state promoted by Jharkhand Mega Food Park Pvt. Ltd. was inaugurated by Food processing minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal at village Getalsud near the Capital City. Spread at an area of 51.50 acres of land at an estimated cost of Rs 114.73 crore the project aimed at creating a modern infrastructure for arresting post-harvest losses of horticultural and non-horticultural produce and provide impetus to the growth of food processing sector in State. However, since its inception not a single unit has started over the years forcing investors to pull out.
An IIM Ranchi graduate, had invested Rs 25 lakh for setting up a milk and yoghurt processing unit due to red tape withdraws from the project. Similarly, two more Ranchi companies, Kitchenmate and Vijay Cashew Industries too followed the same line.
Industry Secretary, K Ravi Kumar said, “The State Government doesn’t have direct control on the food park. Promoters were in touch with the Union ministry for funding and other issues. Our role was to provide land and other issue.”
Kumar further said, “Interested companies can apply to Ministry of Food Processing for getting the promoter of the Mega Food Park.” The secretary claimed that any person can apply for becoming promoters in the company.
The Food Park was set up with public private partnership (PPP) project, to facilitate multi chamber cold storage, dry warehouse, vegetable dehydration line, modern quality control and testing laboratory and other processing facilities for fruits and vegetables.
As the park was set up to cater the needs of farmers of Ranchi, Lohardaga, Gumla, Khunti, Hazaribag and Ramgarh district the closure of Food park is set back for farmers. Arvind Sahu, a farmer at Mandar area said, “Mandar leads in vegetable production, had the food processing park remaining functional it would have helped us getting right price of our produce. Also it would have established Jharkhand in food processing industry.”