The juice plant that Swami Ramdev led at Patanjali Ayurved is finally set to open on March 9, eight years after the announcement that it would soon be a big consumer of oranges grown in the Vidarbh region. We bought 23 acres of land in the Mihan project's domestic tariff area (DTA) in 2016 to build what the company called the "world's largest food park."

The unit will be officially opened on March 9. Multiple people who worked on the project said that the plant can handle up to 800 tonnes of food every day. At first, it will only process oranges, but in the long run, it will also process other fruits like sweet lime and amla.

The plant can process 1.6 times as many oranges every day as arrive at the agriculture product marketing committee's yard at Kalamna, which is known as the biggest in Asia. People who used to be on the council and trade fruits say that Kalamna gets about 500 tons of oranges every day during this time of year. While this is true, the Patanjali plant can handle 800 tonnes of food in a single day.

Eight years after the ceremony to lay the foundation stone at Mihan in 2016, Patanjali's orange processing plant will be up and running. The introduction was pushed back for several reasons, one of which was Covid. The plant finally started working, but it only had a unit for grinding flour at first. It then served other Patanjali units.

At the event where the foundation stone was laid in 2016, Ramdev said that the Nagpur unit was being built to help the farmers in the area more than for business reasons. He said that the Nagpur orange would be processed at this company and then sent all over the world.

It was a big event with Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari and Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis there. These changes mean that Gadkari and Fadnavis will be at the inauguration again on March 9.

Sources say that the gear for processing fruit has been set up and is ready to go. An amount of Rs1,000 crore was spent on the whole project. Not only did Patanjali buy the DTA in Mihan, but they also bought 100 acres of land in the SEZ.

To make net foreign exchange earnings in a SEZ, a manufacturing unit must mostly sell the goods it makes. Patanjali just recently got permission to co-develop the SEZ land. In other words, the company can build a factory on the land itself or rent it out to other companies in the same field.