GURUGRAM: Almost five years after hanging in fire, Gurugram’s flower market project — touted as NCR’s biggest — seems to be finally gaining momentum. The project was conceived in 2015, with an aim to help flower farmers of Haryana showcase and sell their produce in the international market.
State agriculture minister JP Dalal inspected the proposed flower market site in Sector 52A on Friday and held a meeting with officials of the Haryana State Agricultural Marketing Board, who, sources said, told him that the land issue had been sorted out with GMDA.
Talking to the media, the minister said that a special purpose vehicle (SPV) would be formed within 10 days and a revenue model would be chalked out for the implementation of the project.
“HSAMB will form an SPV, in association with GMDA, to run the proposed flower market and call the consultancy firm that took part in the bidding process before taking a call on the revenue model and modus operandi of the market. All these processes will take shape in the next two months,” he said.
“Lakhs of farmers of Haryana will benefit from the proposed flower market. Once it starts, the Haryana farmers will no longer have to go to Delhi to sell their produce. Along with saving their transportation expenses, profits will also increase,” the agriculture minister said.
In fact, this project was announced by then Haryana agriculture minister OP Dhankar during his address at the first Agri Leadership Summit in 2015. Dhankar then claimed that this project would be complete within two and a half years. However, five years on, the project is still at a “progressive stage”.
Every year, flowers worth Rs 260-Rs 275cr make it to Gurugram markets via Delhi’s Ghazipur mandi, which records a total trade of Rs 650-Rs 700cr annually, as per Haryana marketing board estimates.
And it’s the flower farmers of Gurugram and other districts of Haryana who are forced to sell their produce in Gazipur mandi in the absence of such a market in this district.
Traditional flowers such as marigold and rose are grown in abundance in Gurugram, Panipat, Karnal, Sonipat, Ambala, Kurukshetra, Jind, Bhiwani, Jhajjar and Yamunanagar.
Sumedha Kataria, chief administrator of HSAMB, said, “The proposed market will have an auction centre, a centre for grading and sorting of flowers besides retail outlets. The government also plans to open a centre of research for flowers in this market.”