HIDCO plans to supply organic vegetables post Durga Puja in New Town

WBHIDCO had started a rooftop solar organic farming recently and they have planned to bring up two stalls of New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA) from where organic vegetables, produced without using chemical fertilisers, will be sold. 

Debashis Sen, chairman of WBHIDCO is hopeful that the organic vegetables would fetch markets soon after they are made available, as they are gaining popularity globally. In Western countries, the doctors often prescribe organic vegetables to cure some incurable diseases. Their demand is also growing rapidly in India.

Bamboo made baskets will be used to grow these vegetables since they would use organic compost and coconut fibre coir instead of earth. The vegetables that are unsold and hence thrown away into the garbage will be used in the compost plant. Rainwater tanks have been constructed from which a regulated amount of water would be regularly sprinkled on the vegetables. The water that will be stored during monsoon in the tanks would be used throughout the year. The sheds are made of solar panels that produce power which is fed to the grid through a net metering process, which helps in checking the power consumption.

It is worthy of a mention that the Panchayat and Rural Development department has started producing organic vegetables and has selected some villages where organic farming is being done under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Urban Mission Act (MGNREGA) scheme. If successful, the department will select some more villages in other districts to carry out organic farming. Senior officials of the department said that the project was working quite satisfactorily in Nadia.