Swapan Debnath, Minister of state for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) department, on Monday visited Durgapur state dairy to take stock of the progress in the work undertaken by the state government to revive the dairy.
If everything goes as planned, production will start at the dairy this month itself. It has been learnt that in addition to milk, the dairy will now onwards produce ice cream, chocolate ice cream, various soft drinks and other preparations.
Mother Dairy will engage employees as per the contract between the state government and the Durgapur state dairy. The local residents had earlier urged the Minister for employment opportunities at the dairy. The residents again appealed to the Minister for jobs after his visit to the dairy was over. The Minister assured them that it would be taken up with the authorities.
The Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress government had decided to revive the Durgapur State dairy, which had been ailing due to financial constraints for a long time. It was closed in 2010.
In 2014, the state government decided to hand over operations of to Indian dairy major Mother Dairy. The Bengal government has also allotted Rs 7.65 crore for the revival of the ailing dairy.
In 1972, Sidhhartha Shankar Ray, the then Chief Minister of West Bengal, had inaugurated the Durgapur state dairy. During the time, production of milk at the factory was estimate to be around 50,000 litres per day.
However, corruption among a section of employees, over-burdening of the employees and lack of modern technology finally led to the shutdown of the dairy.
The dairy had been ailing for a long time as it had repeatedly failed to increase the requisite daily level of production.
In 2013, the then state Industries minister Partha Chatterjee announced that the Burdwan Dairy would be handed over to Mother Dairy.
Following this announcement, employees of the Durgapur state dairy were also waiting for a similar announcement, which happened in 2014.