Work is on in full swing on the Barauni urea undertaking website. (Categorical picture by Harish Damodaran)
Bihar, for lengthy, has been a graveyard of business. These looking for a glimmer of hope, although, needn’t look past Barauni city in Begusarai district. Billed as Bihar’s “industrial capital” – voting for the state meeting polls right here is on November 3 – it’s truly witnessing a resurgence of kinds.
There’s no higher image of that than the Hindustan Fertilizer Company Ltd’s (HFCL) ammonia-urea advanced at Barauni, shut down in January 1999. It’s now being revived – via the organising of a model new plant on the identical 480 acres land that housed the sooner undertaking. At Rs 7,043.26 crore capital value, it could be Bihar’s largest industrial funding.
“Development is greater than 70 per cent full. Equipment orders are already positioned, and we are going to start pre-commissioning and commissioning exercise from February,” mentioned Sunil Kumar Sinha, normal supervisor of Hindustan Urvarak & Rasayan Ltd (HURL) accountable for the undertaking website that at the moment has 5,000-plus employees alongside Sarens, Sanghvi and Escorts Hydra cranes, JCB excavators and Putzmeister growth placers.
The brand new plant – which might produce 2,200 metric tonnes per day (mtpd) of ammonia and three,850 mtpd urea, as in opposition to the 600 mtpd and 1,000 mtpd capability of the defunct unit – was purported to be prepared by Could 2021, 36 months from the date of funding approval. That schedule has been considerably upset, due to the disruptions from Covid-19 and lockdown. Observe Bihar Election 2020 Voting Live Updates
“Until March 21, we had about 4,000 employees. As soon as lockdown was imposed, all work stopped. The district administration gave us permission to restart on April 26, however most employees (75% from Bihar and the remaining from West Bengal, Jharkhand and different states) had already left. We may resume solely on Could 4 with the 600-700 who had stayed again within the labour camps right here. Because the lockdown eased, the employee power rose to 1,900 in early-June, 3,500 in July, 4,000 in August and 5,000 from September,” added Sinha.
The urea silo of the defuct fertiliser unit at Barauni. (Categorical picture by Harish Damodaran)
Arun Kumar Gupta, managing director of HURL, was hopeful of the undertaking being commissioned by December 2021. The corporate – a three way partnership of Coal India Ltd, NTPC, Indian Oil Company (IOC), HFCL and Fertilizer Company of India – can also be placing up two different similar-sized ammonia-urea complexes at Gorakhpur (Uttar Pradesh) and Sindri (Jharkhand). These, like Barauni, are greenfield pure gas-based vegetation in areas that beforehand had models operating on naphtha and gas oil, respectively, and mendacity closed for twenty years or extra.
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“The industrial operation date for Gorakhpur was initially February 2021. However attributable to Covid, that can now be August, whereas November-December for Barauni and Sindri,” Gupta advised The Indian Express. Urea from these vegetation would, thus, be out there to farmers from subsequent 12 months’s rabi cropping season. HURL has even began advertising its ‘Apna’ urea model in Bihar since February, by sourcing materials from the general public sector Rashtriya Chemical compounds and Fertilizers.
For Bihar, the Barauni undertaking’s revival isn’t any small factor. Its annual manufacturing capability, at 12.7 lakh tonnes (lt), can meet a significant a part of the state’s consumption/gross sales of twenty-two.64 lt in 2019-20. Neither Bihar nor Jharkhand have any urea vegetation; the closest one at Phulpur in UP is 490 km from Barauni and 550 km from Sindri. Each tasks will get gasoline from GAIL (India) Ltd’s Jagdishpur-Phulpur-Haldia pipeline. A spur line, from Dobhi in Gaya, has already been laid until Barauni.
However Begusarai’s revival story – whose fruits would accrue to whichever authorities comes subsequent – isn’t confined to urea.
IOC’s oil refinery at Barauni was India’s second after Assam’s Digboi. It got here on stream in July 1964 with a a million tonnes (mt) annual crude processing capability, augmented to three mt in 1969 and 6 mt by 2002. On January 30, after practically 18 years, the IOC board authorized an additional enlargement to 9 mt at an estimated value of Rs 13,779 crore. This undertaking – entailing the organising of a brand new 9 mt atmospheric and vacuum distillation unit, the contract for which was awarded to L&T Hydrocarbon Engineering in April – is to be commissioned by April 2023.
Equally vital is the Barauni Thermal Energy Station (BTPS). This coal-fired undertaking, too, got here up within the early-sixties, with 5 models of 145 megawatt (MW) mixture technology capability being made operational between January 1963 and December 1971. All of them had been retired by 1995-96. Models 6 and seven, of 110 MW every established in 1984-85, had been taken up for renovation and modernisation.
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On December 15, 2018, NTPC acquired BTPS from the Bihar State Energy Era Firm. At the moment, not solely are models 6 & 7 operating, a brand new 250 MW plant was declared operational from March 1, this 12 months. One other 250 MW unit is predicted to be added by 2021, taking the whole to 720 MW.
Final however not least is the Barauni Dairy. With a turnover of Rs 755.36 crore, it’s not simply Bihar’s, but in addition jap India’s, largest cooperative dairy union. In 2019-20, the Deshratna Dr Rajendra Prasad Dugdh Utpadak Sahkari Sangh, as it’s referred to as, made Rs 499.03 crore of funds to 1.32 lakh farmers and procured 4.55 lakh kg per day of milk on a median.
Barauni Dairy is planning to speculate Rs 95.5 crore in what would be the nation’s largest plant for making indigenous milk merchandise. The proposed plant will eat 2 lakh litres per day of milk to completely produce rasagulla, gulab jamun, peda, cham cham, kalakand, misti dahi, raskadam, milk cake, khoa, paneer, lassi and plain dahi. The dairy union is already utilizing 70,000-80,000 litres each day now for producing indigenous milk sweets underneath the ‘Sudha’ model.
“We’re in discussions with the Nationwide Dairy Growth Board for a Rs 70 crore mortgage at 6.5% concessional rate of interest for 10 years underneath the Centre’s Dairy Processing & Infrastructure Fund. Because the land for the undertaking is obtainable right here, we will count on the plant to be prepared in 2-3 years time,” acknowledged a Barauni Union official.
