বাংলায় পড়ুন
In order to give a positive fillip to the tea industry, Kolkata Port Trust will put up a Tea Park. An initial round out talks with Tea Board authorities has also been done.
In an event organized by Bharat Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday, chairman of Kolkata Port Trust (KoPT), Vineet Kumar said that KoPT had about 30-acre land at Panskura in East Midnapore district. And another piece of land at Sankrail area in Howrah district where work for Tea Park has begun.
Interestingly, at Siliguri, another Tea Park has been put up by the Siliguri-Jalpaiguri Development Authority.
KoPT authorities had earlier said that a terminal would be built at Balagarh in Hooghly district to ease pressure on Kolkata and Haldia ports. Sources said that the 300-acre land on which the terminal is supposed to come up, KoPT wants to mark it as an economic zone.
The Centre has already announced about its plan to build National Waterways I from Haldia to Varanasi-Allahabad. Haldia Port will get special attention in the goods corridor. Again the two ports also handle a lot of pressure for goods which are transported to north India via road. Kumar confirmed that the plan for the new terminal was aimed at lowering pressure on the two terminals. He said that by the end of September this year, work for the new terminal will be initiated and at that time only bids would be invited.
Kumar also said that in the present financial year, goods movement at KoPT has increased by nine percent. While in 2017-18 the port had handled 5.8 crore tonne of cargo traffic in 2018-19 it has been 6.2 crore tonne so far. He also said that at Haldia they are planning to create a separate berth for transporting steel. It would incur a cost of Rs 300 crore. Again in another project which is underway, better tech intervention will bring down the time taken to load cargo on trains from the present 6-7 hours to two hours. An amount of Rs 80 crore will also be spent on upgrading roads around KoPT for facilitating better and smoother transport of cargo on road.
