At last, the Uttar Pradesh government?s efforts to wash its hands off the 11 sugar mills of the Sugar Corporation and 24 sugar mills of the Sugar Cooperative Federation seem to be nearing fruition. More so with the state government offering an olive branch in the form of granting distillery licences that would allow the private companies to produce industrial alcohol from cane juice. This in an added incentive, as getting licence for running a distillery unit is indeed difficult.
With many serious buyers showing interest in the process for the first time, thanks to the state government changing many of its earlier policies to incorporate the requirements of the private sector, the process to sell the mills in the state and cooperative sector seems to be heading in the right direction. And in an effort to seal the deal the state government added the ‘free licence’ offer, so that the process, which had been hanging fire for the last two years, is finally tied up.
The state government lined up its senior officials at the second pre-bid conference in Lucknow, which was called to address the queries and quell the apprehensions of the shortlisted bidders after their physical verification of the mills. Howerver, nobody from the state government was willing to come on record.
?This conference was more of a grievance redressal meet in which the state government gave clarifications to individual bidders regarding their doubts about the infrastructure, manpower and other mill-related apprehensions or doubts that they had after the due diligence of the mills. Since only the serious buyers had been shortlisted and invited, this meet was a platform for allying the specific fears that these bidders had and the government tried its best to understand the requirements of the bidders and come up with solutions,? said a representative of one of the companies which had placed bids for the mills.
?The government is under pressure to settle the issue of these mills soon as there is very little time left for the next crushing season to begin. And in order to make the offer more attractive, the government has added the clause of granting license for running distillery units alongwith the mill,? said another bidder who was in town to attend the conference.
However, while the bidders seem to be happy with the offer, BM Singh, the leader who has been spearheading the cause of the farmers, sees a game plan in the move.
?The government is selling these units at a throwaway price. Since most of the mills having large land banks to add to their attractiveness, the government is literally throwing away the mills. The land banks of Bareilly and Meerut mills, in fact, have a commercial value of more than Rs 200 crore. The worst hit in this will be the farmers, daily wagers and labourers. They do not want the mills to be sold off, as many of these mills have not only posted profit in the last season but were also the first ones to pay off the arrears of cane, forcing which other private millers also started paying cane arrears,? he said.
In fact, learning from the past experiences, the state government changed its policies this time and instead of bulk selling, decided to put up individual units for sale.
For instance if a private investor wants to buy only one unit, he will be able to apply for the same. So instead of selling all the 33 units of Sugar Corporation mills, disinvestment of only 11 profit-making and operating units have been put up for the slump sale.
It may be mentioned that the interested bidders include Indian Potash, Triveni Engineering, Balrampur Sugar, Dwarikesh Sugar, Patel Engineering, Bajaj Hindustan, Dalmia Sugar, Sakseria group, Wave Industries, Lakshmipathy Balaji Sugar and Distilleries, DCM Shriram, PBS Food, Ticola Sugars and SBEC Bio Energy, etc.
