By IANS,
Lucknow: Decks have been cleared or the sale of 14 state-owned sugar mills in Uttar Pradesh.
These mills are among the 33 identified by the state government as “sick” and 22 of these have been shut for several years.
The government had taken a policy decision for disinvestment in each of these mills, but could not go ahead with its plans due to repeated legal hurdles.
“Now that the legal obstacles were overcome in 14 cases, we decided to proceed with our disinvestment plan. under which we have now invited bids for sale of 14 of these mills”, a spokesman of the state sugar corporation told IANS here Thursday.
“With some well known players from the industry having show keen interest, we are quite confident of getting a very good response to the request for qualification (RFQ) issued by us Tuesday”, he said.
Among those who have evinced interest in taking over these mills are Indian Potash Ltd, Wave Industries and the Parle Group.
The corporation has fixed July 15 as the last date for filing of bid applications.
A high-level disinvestment committee, headed by chief secretary Atul Kumar Gupta, will hold a pre-bid meeting July 1.