|
The Hindustan Paper Corporation (HPC) has started to import paper pulp from Singapore after it failed to obtain its principal raw material of 250,000 tonnes of bamboo a year.
The CEO of the plant, T.R. Gowda, last night said already one such consignment of the pulp from Singapore, weighing 50 tonnes, has arrived while another bulk import was on its way to Calcutta.
The crisis in the supply of bamboos, particularly of muli variety, to this Rs 384-crore plant was triggered early this year after the Mizoram government reneged on its contract to supply bamboo to the HPC’s plant at Panchgram.
Gowda said the crisis occurred as the forest authorities in Mizoram were “streamlining its supply and charting out an estimate of the state’s annual bamboo yield, that was ravaged in the last decade by the bamboo famine, a strange ecological phenomenon”.
Moreover, the forest authorities in neighbouring Dima Hasao district have not also been able to keep a steady supply of such bamboo. They are providing only of 300 tonnes of bamboo either in a week or fortnight.
Gowda said the local supply of bamboo to the mill has also “considerably slumped”, thus adding to the crisis.
Sources in the paper mill said today as a result of this bamboo shortage, the paper output in this plant has shrunk.
Sources pointed out that the output of the paper during the fiscal year of 2006-07 was 103,155 tonnes as against its target of the annual production at 1 lakh tonne.
In the fiscal 2005-06, the production was around 100,630 tonnes.
These are the only two years when the paper mill was able to cross the output target of 1 lakh tonne a year.
Sources, however, said the HPC was trying to end the crisis through dialogues with the Mizoram government forest departments and Dima Hasao administration.
In 2009, the mill authorities had toyed with the idea of using some non-conventional raw inputs like the firewood, carton boxes and waste paper cuttings, but this experiment could not make any positive breakthrough, the source said.
Source : telegraphindia.com
|