Flower auction house set to go hitech, online

By Alladi Jayasri

BANGALORE, OCT. 31. The flower auction house -- the flagship activity of the Karnataka Agro Industries Corporation (KAIC)'s floriculture division -- is all set to go hi-tech and on-line. A new company, the International Flower Auction Bangalore Limited (IFAB), with major equity for growers, has been registered, and is being incorporated.

In a proposal, whose cost was scaled down from Rs. 40.6 crores to Rs. 10.38 crores, without compromising on any of the features that will make the flower auction house unique in Asia, the IFAB is envisaged as a one-stop shop for growers and buyers, Dr. T.V.Reddy, Special Officer, Floriculture Division, KAIC, told The Hindu.

The floriculture division of KAIC was the nodal agency in the State for importing special pesticides for the floriculture industry. The IFAB would house the agency, offer all facilities including phone, fax, and a cafeteria, apart from a buyers' area where agents from outside the city could store their consignments before packing them, and so on, he said.

An on-line auction, for which an evaluation of portals was being done, would be a boon to traders at all floriculture centres in the country, as it would do away with the movement of the actual consignment between Bangalore and other centres. Dr. Reddy said once a deal was struck on-line, the logistics would merely involve moving the flowers from the source to the buyer.

Dr. Reddy said the Rs. 10.38-crore project envisaged the creation of the IFAB, which would lease the 6.2 acres of land (where the auction house was currently located) from the KAIC, (the land value had been put at over Rs.6.12 crores), and the building of a new facility with a grant of Rs. 3.75 crores from the Agricultural and Processed-Foods Export Development Authority (APEDA) by raising Rs. 70 lakhs from buyers and growers. Construction was due to start in January 2002, and the facility would go into operation within 12 to 18 months.

With consultancy from the Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI), the IFAB would also become Bangalore's second unit, apart from TERI, that would be energy-efficient, sporting features such as solar passive architecture, selective use of "jalli" walls, partial earth-berming to reduce heat load in the cold storage system, and programmable logistic controls for storage and conveyor systems.

Mr. K.P.Pravinjith, consulting engineer, TERI Centre for Renewable Energy and Environmental Studies, said the IFAB building would use motorised louvres and other systems for window openings that facilitated air circulation and ventilation, apart from maximum utilisation of natural daylight. Energy efficient artificial lighting, compact fluorescent lamps, timers, day link sensors and occupancy sensors, space conditioning for energising chillers, apart from a 10-kw solar photo-voltaic cell with battery bank, invertor and generator, would keep the consumption of power down to the minimum.

He said the equity holders were the KAIC and the Karnataka Agriculture Product and Processing Export Corporation (KAPPEC) with 26 per cent, the South India Floriculturists Association (SIFA) with 51 per cent, small growers with 17 per cent and buyers, six per cent.

The flower auction house, that had started in a very small way five years ago in a shed, had excited the APEDA enough for it to contemplate setting up four more facilities in Pune, Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai. However, none of them had seen the light of day.

At the time, the APEDA had brought in Holland-based European Auction Builders (EAB) as consultants to do a techno-feasibility study for a state-of-the-art model of a flower auction house. The EAB had given a Rs. 40.6-crore proposal to set up a facility at Bangalore on a 10-acre plot. The idea was dropped as the cost of the project high, and floriculture was only a "sunrise sector" with Bangalore's auction house doing a turnover of a mere Rs. 19.63 lakhs in 1997-98.

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