Agartala: Tripura Wedneday received its first major investment after the BJP-led government came to power last year, with the inauguration of a Rs 85 crore food park that is expected to generate employment for around 30,000 people, officials said. The food park is the 18th of its kind in the country and has been set up at Tulakona, about 10 km from the state capital. Inaugurating the food park, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, Union Minister of State for Food processing Industries, said it would provide excellent infrastructural facilities for food processing and allied industries along with the value chain from the farm market and centralised processing centres.
The park has been set up by Kolkata-based Sikaria Mega Food Park Private Ltd. She said in 2011, the Centre had given permission to open this Mega Food Park in Tripura, but the previous Left Front government did not take any initiative to open it. "The previous government did not take any step to improve the industry in the state," Jyoti alleged. "During the UPA government regime, only two food parks were operating in the country. After the NDA government led by Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, he pledged that he would set up 40 Mega Food Parks in India.
"Now, we have 17 Food parks and with the inauguration of this one the number of food parks rose to 18 this year. We have set a target of setting up 22 new food parks in the country," she said. However, she did not mention the time frame for setting up of the 22 new food parks. The Tripura Mega Food Park has been set up on 50 acres provided by the Tripura Industrial development corporation Ltd. Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb, who also participated at the inauguration event, said the food park would help solve unemployment problem to some extent.
This project would generate fresh direct and indirect employment of about 30,000 people in the state in the primary field of food processing, agriculture, agro processing and the post-harvest agri infrastructure," Deb said. He said the Mega Food Park project is proposed to house over 35 food processing units with fresh capital investment of around Rs 250-350 crore in the food processing sector in Tripura.
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