Leather complex clubs investments with green move

KOLKATA:

Calcutta Leather Complex

in

Bantala

, spread over an area bigger than the place earmarked for Nano car project, is scripting a success story, attracting

investments

worth Rs 5,000 crore and at the same time addressing environmental concerns, augmenting the capacity of a common

effluent treatment

plant, treating waste water chemically, mechanically and biologically before releasing it in canals and planting thousands of trees. Going by a rough government estimate, the biggest leather complex in Asia is set to generate up to 3 lakh jobs in the next five years.

In December last year, chief minister Mamata Banerjee had said the state had received 1,000 applications from investors willing to set up business at the leather complex. Now, 400 tanneries employ close to 1.5 lakh people.

In the mid-’90s, the erstwhile Left Front government acquired 1,100 acres in Bantala to set up the leather complex, complete with a centralised effluent treatment plant, and relocate almost 600 tanneries from Topsia, Tangra and Tiljala. In 2006, the then government earmarked 130 acres for IT industries and declared it a Special Economic Zone (a TOI report in January erroneously mentioned that the entire 1,100 acres was an SEZ).

“A total of 1,100 acres was acquired to set up the leather complex but in 2006, the state purportedly permitted change in user pattern of 130 acres out of 332 acres, originally earmarked for tanneries, in an approved detailed project report to benefit a few people. It was challenged in a writ in 2008 and another in 2015,” said Imran Ahmed Khan, general secretary (honorary) of CLC Tanners’ Association.

On February 15, 2019, a note from the micro, small, and medium enterprise and textile department to the CLC CEO confirmed the state had decided to shift all IT/ITes/telecom firms from Bantala to Bengal Silicon Valley in New Town. The shift was decided to use the entire area for leather industry, given the huge demand from tanneries across the country. Three big-ticket investors from UP, Tamil Nadu and Bengal were allotted token land in CLC at the Bengal Global Business Summit two weeks ago. It was earlier reported in TOI that the state decided on the relocation as the effluent plant was barely functional but CLC Tanners’ Association said they had invested hundreds of crores in five years to treat waste. The treated effluent is discharged into Karaidanga Canal that transports the waste to the Bay of Bengal.

Four modules of the CETP, each of 5,000 m3/d, are functional now and two others are under construction. Two more are on the cards. CLC has also started a pilot project in collaboration with Central Leather Research Institute to generate biogas from solid waste.

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