Mega refinery project to be revived in Maharashtra

After losing out to a bunch of mega investments including the Vedanta-Foxconn and Tata-Airbus, the Eknath Shinde-Devendra Fadnavis government inched a step closer to the revival of the ambitious super-refinery project in the Ratnagiri district along the coastal Konkan belt of Maharashtra.

The project involves an Indian consortium consisting of Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL), and Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL) that signed an MoU with Saudi Arabian Oil Co (Saudi Aramco) for setting up India's largest refinery and petroleum complex - close to the Arabian Sea.

The Rs 3 lakh crore project - known as the Ratnagiri Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd (RRPCL)- would have been the largest single-location refinery complex in the world with a capacity of 60 million tonnes and would create tremendous direct and indirect jobs.

This would be the single biggest project in India.

Earlier, the project was planned in Nanar, however, now it would come up in the Barsu site.

Incidentally, both Nanar and Barsu are located in the Rajapur tehsil of Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra.

It may be recalled, in February 2019, when then BJP President Amit Shah, now also the Union Home Minister, Fadnavis, then the Chief Minister and Shiv Sena President Uddhav Thackeray finalised the seat and power-sharing formula for 2019 Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha polls, scrapping Nanar project was one of the conditions.

When the BJP-Shiv Sena government was in power from 2014-19, the Shiv Sena had sided with the locals who were opposing the project.

When Thackeray was the Chief Minister, the Maha Vikas Aghadi government worked on the alternate site of Barsu.

Interestingly, MLA Rajan Salvi of the Thackeray group has supported the government's move.

State Industries Minister Uday Samant said that the project would be set up after taking the farmers and local people into confidence. “The compensation will be higher than the ready reckoner (RR) rate,” he said.

Samant, who hails from the Ratnagiri district, held a meeting with the public representatives in Mantralaya in connection with the proposed revival of the refinery project.

After the meeting, Samant told the reporters that the refinery project would require 6,200 acres of land. Out of this, the landowners have also given consent letters for 2,900 acres of land. "The process of acquiring the remaining land is under way,” he said.