Fertilizer City

Fertilizer City is a gated township in Ramagundam, Karimnagar district in the Indian state of Telangana.

History

Township was built in late 1970's for the employees of Ramagundam unit of Fertilizer Corporation of India. Production was stopped from 1 April 1999 as a result of Government of India's policy and majority of employees were released on Voluntary Separation Scheme (VSS) by 2002-03. Presently very few are on the payroll of Corporation to look after safety and security of properties and discharge statutory obligations of the Company.

Ramagundam unit was unique in terms of Urea and Ammonia production wherein coal gasification methodology was used - FCI Ramagundam (simultaneously with FCI Talcher) was the first fertilizer plant in India to use coal gasification technology besides being world's biggest coal gasification based fertilizer unit.

Layout and facilities

Fertilizer City is a gated township with two entrances having over 1,200 housing units with a shopping complex, hospital, banks, recreation centre, club, 2 guest houses, 4 parks, a few temples, a church, gurudwara and a mosque. The township also has badminton, basketball, cricket, shuttle, soccer, tennis, volleyball courts/grounds - also a movie theatre in the recreation centre. Movies were played on weekends during 1980's - from the mid 1980s the township has had a cable television network (first in India). The fertilizer factory spread over 1500 acres and the township is of 2500 acres.

Schools

All schools were closed by 2003.

Transportation

TSRTC runs daily bus services to several local and Intra-State destinations including State Capital city Hyderabad.

Auto-Rickshaw bay/stand is present inside the township. Auto-Rickshaws are generally used to get to Ramagundam railway station.

Current status

On 14th Jan 2015 NDA government assigned a joint venture (NFL+EIL) to revive the plant. The new joint venture has been named as "Ramagundam Fertilizers and Chemicals Ltd/RFCL".[1]

It has been announced that a new gas-based mega fertilizer unit with an estimated cost of INR 5000 crores will be established at Ramagundam - a consortium of PSU's (National Fertilizers Ltd., Engineers India Ltd. and FCI) has been entrusted the responsibility to implement the same. It is reported that the zero date (as of now) has been fixed to be somewhere in 2017.

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/13/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.