Odisha minister writes to Centre over merger of Bhubaneswar, Patna regions of CWC

Bhubaneswar: Odisha Food Supplies and Consumer Welfare Minister Ranendra Pratap Swain on Saturday wrote a letter to Union Food Minister Ram Vilas Paswan against Centre's decision to merge Bhubaneswar and Patna regions of the Central Warehousing Corporation (CWC).

The Centre had recently decided to merge Patna and Bhubaneswar regional offices into a single entity with its headquarters in Patna, Bihar. The new region will be named after Patna.

The minister sought Paswan's personal intervention to allow Bhubaneswar region to continue to work, saying that the decision will "seriously jeopardise the interest of the people of Odisha".

"As one of the fifteen Offices of CWC functioning across the country, the Regional Office at Bhubaneswar was established in the year 1990 which has now the operational capacity of 3.48 lakh metric ton catering to the needs of storage at 21 locations in 15 districts spread over the entire State of Odisha.

"More than 90 per cent of the employees working in Bhubaneswar Regional Office are the local Odia people. Moreover, this region is having 90 per cent occupancy and continuously giving profit during the last five years," the letter reads.

He also said that the merger of Bhubaneswar region into Patna will make it monitoring various activities "extremely difficult". "Progress of warehousing operations in Odisha will be severely hampered and CWC will ultimately incur a huge loss," it said.

The matter was recently raised in the state Assembly where, the letter said, MLAs cutting across party lines opposed the decision.