6 days ago
Tikri-Khampur mandi master plan to be revived soon
New Delhi: With the proposal to build a new wholesale fruit and vegetable market in northwest Delhi's Tikri-Khampur gathering dust for several years, Delhi development minister
Kapil Mishra
has asked the officials to revive it and prepare a master plan within a month.
Conceived in 1997 for the first time with the aim to decongest Asia's largest mandi at Azadpur, Tikri-Khampur project remained on paper for almost 20 years. Though it was revived in 2019, it was put on the backburner due to Covid-19. It was again pushed in 2022, but despite all relevant departments granting approvals, it remained only on files.
Officials said Mishra recently held a meeting of the Delhi Agricultural Marketing Board and sought to revive it.
"The minister has issued instructions to prepare the master plan with the details on infrastructure development, traffic management, and the expansion of trade facilities," said a senior Delhi govt official. The facility, said officials, will come up on a 70-acre land that was acquired as early as 1997.
Azadpur mandi currently witnesses a daily footfall of about 50,000 people and a movement of 3,000 inter-state and local trucks entering the complex.
There are nearly 2,500 licensed traders at Azadpur APMC and close to 25,000 working there. While a separate plan to decongest Azadpur mandi is in the offing, officials agreed that the construction of a new mandi at Tikri-Khampur will help solve the problem of congestion.
To prevent diesel trucks from entering the city and causing traffic jams at Azadpur mandi, Delhi govt built a temporary market at Tikri-Khampur in 2022, and the experiment proved successful.
Once the permanent structures are built, all inter-state trucks will unload the fruits and vegetables at Tikri-Khampur, and smaller CNG vehicles will take them further to other wholesale markets. "This will help decongest the area around Azadpur to a large extent," said an official.
According to officials, the Delhi govt set aside a fund of about Rs 280 crore for the construction of the mandi in 2017, but it failed to take off. "For all these years, govt has claimed that the work at Tikri-Khampur will start soon. We hope this time the govt is serious about it," said Rajeev Bhati, a wholesaler.
